One of my favorite games when traveling is spotting the iconic horn antennas that are still in operation or the various towers that were a part of it. A good chunk of the site are still in active use with all kinds of new equipment bolted onto them, and you can sometimes see holes in the platforms where the original horn antennas used to be mounted.
Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!
There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel
> Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range
In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].
I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.
Somehow I was recommended the /r/longlines subreddit, so I subscribed. I now get pretty much a daily picture of a Long Lines abandoned tower somewhere in the country with upvotes and discussion. It is fascinating the hobbies people have.
This was a great article and put some context around it. It's interesting that many of these stations are basically apocalypse bunkers to keep equipment shielded for military use. There are many sites with the equipment still just sitting there untouched, slowly aging away.
How to keep something working and resilient 24/7/365 is extremely fascinating to me, and a lot of the old Long Lines stuff was built with the idea of attempting to survive a possible nuclear war. Even the reason why locations were chosen were part of that.
> The era spawning from the 1950s throughout the 1980s can be considered the golden era of telecommunication
I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!
It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.
i haven't had a landline for a loong time, so i'm curious -- do long distance phone plans even exist anymore?
there were so many TV ads and telemarketers pushing those plans that "the last long distance phone plan closed today" seems like it would've been a bigger story and the end-of-an-era.
AFAICT, the rules requiring consumers to be able to choose a long distance carrier came into effect with the 1984 AT&T breakup, and those rules were never applied to the VOIP providers we have today for "landline" service.
But if a person can even get a traditional POTS landline (a pair of wires extending from the handset to the telco CO) at all in 2026, then: I'd imagine that choice still exists. There's probably still information about it on the back of the phone bill that shows up once every month.
But that whole business is practically dead, hence the lack of popular advertising.
It amazes me sometimes. One year, it was kit-and-parcel to move to a new place and order a real phone line (maybe with the same number -- or maybe not!), and it was important to make sensible choices for a long distance carrier. Then, MCI started offering flat-rate long distance for $50 per month. Soon after, it was common to switch to ISP-bundled VOIP to save some money, or perhaps a discount provider like MagicJack.
Then cell phone plans got cheap (Verizon was offering them for $7/mo at one point -- cheap enough for everyone in the family to have their own, and save money doing it!), and then got they got very expensive with the introduction of the pocket supercomputer, and now that pocket supercomputers are ubiquitous the plans can be cheap again.
Throughout all of these perfectly-rational and very sleepy transitions, the old telco cable plant still persists. It's in shambles, but it's present. One can see the infrastructure hanging up there on poles and connecting to houses, or down there with pedestals poking out of the ground roadside, but (at least in my city) ~nobody uses it for anything in the consumer space.
Good riddance. The amount of scams in the long distance industry was baffling. Legend has it one of the companies named themself "I Don't Care" so if someone said that when asked which long distance carrier you wanted, that's who you got with their ridiculously expensive rates. Calling cards were just an extension of the same idea.
Long distance plans were a regulatory invention that allowed customers to opt out of the local phone company's long distance service. Today those companies don't make monopoly profits (because everyone uses mobile phones and VoIP) so they price their bundled services reasonably. This pretty much kills the market for stand alone long distance plans, although they do seem to exist still.
No market, no advertising.
The history of these early networks is really interesting. I was digging into the history of early radio networks and found some of the details of the dedicated circuits fascinating. NBC was actually created by AT&T.
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.
I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.)
The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house.
I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something.
If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.
I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables.
The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties.
For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.
ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time.
Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities.
Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done.
And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?).
And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion.
Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either).
We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
Verizon decends from Bell ROCs, but not from the national AT&T company.
Current AT&T is the result of Bell ROCs buying out the national AT&T company.
But it's not the same company at all. The commitment to reliability is gone, the full vertical integration is gone, the monopoly revenues are gone. The market for phone calls is quite different as well.
It's a shame to have lost reliability and the increase in latency for audio is objectively bad and I don't know if we'll ever get back to near zero added latency on phone calls. Otoh, telecom competititon has driven much more capable and less expensive offerings, when they work.
Those are lovely rose-colored glasses! :) My understanding is that they also charged high rates for calling the next city, and more for calling further, opposed / dragged their heels on new tech like broadband data .... Since then we have essentially free communication - voice, video, and text - anywhere in the world, several broadband technologies, cell phones, endless VOIP options, faxes (did AT&T support those?) ... in fact, landlines are mostly gone.
Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.
> they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.
Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.
One of my favorite games when traveling is spotting the iconic horn antennas that are still in operation or the various towers that were a part of it. A good chunk of the site are still in active use with all kinds of new equipment bolted onto them, and you can sometimes see holes in the platforms where the original horn antennas used to be mounted.
Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!
There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel
> Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range
In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].
[1] https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters....
Neat seeing this get posted! There's a great map of these at https://long-lines.com
https://long-lines.net/ and the coldwarcomms group are always interesting as well.
For anyone who wants a fun entry point into the rabbit hole, I'd recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Offices
I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.
[0]https://long-lines.com/viewsite/10470
Somehow I was recommended the /r/longlines subreddit, so I subscribed. I now get pretty much a daily picture of a Long Lines abandoned tower somewhere in the country with upvotes and discussion. It is fascinating the hobbies people have.
This was a great article and put some context around it. It's interesting that many of these stations are basically apocalypse bunkers to keep equipment shielded for military use. There are many sites with the equipment still just sitting there untouched, slowly aging away.
How to keep something working and resilient 24/7/365 is extremely fascinating to me, and a lot of the old Long Lines stuff was built with the idea of attempting to survive a possible nuclear war. Even the reason why locations were chosen were part of that.
The original article is better: https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-...
> The era spawning from the 1950s throughout the 1980s can be considered the golden era of telecommunication
I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!
It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.
i haven't had a landline for a loong time, so i'm curious -- do long distance phone plans even exist anymore?
there were so many TV ads and telemarketers pushing those plans that "the last long distance phone plan closed today" seems like it would've been a bigger story and the end-of-an-era.
AFAICT, the rules requiring consumers to be able to choose a long distance carrier came into effect with the 1984 AT&T breakup, and those rules were never applied to the VOIP providers we have today for "landline" service.
But if a person can even get a traditional POTS landline (a pair of wires extending from the handset to the telco CO) at all in 2026, then: I'd imagine that choice still exists. There's probably still information about it on the back of the phone bill that shows up once every month.
But that whole business is practically dead, hence the lack of popular advertising.
It amazes me sometimes. One year, it was kit-and-parcel to move to a new place and order a real phone line (maybe with the same number -- or maybe not!), and it was important to make sensible choices for a long distance carrier. Then, MCI started offering flat-rate long distance for $50 per month. Soon after, it was common to switch to ISP-bundled VOIP to save some money, or perhaps a discount provider like MagicJack.
Then cell phone plans got cheap (Verizon was offering them for $7/mo at one point -- cheap enough for everyone in the family to have their own, and save money doing it!), and then got they got very expensive with the introduction of the pocket supercomputer, and now that pocket supercomputers are ubiquitous the plans can be cheap again.
Throughout all of these perfectly-rational and very sleepy transitions, the old telco cable plant still persists. It's in shambles, but it's present. One can see the infrastructure hanging up there on poles and connecting to houses, or down there with pedestals poking out of the ground roadside, but (at least in my city) ~nobody uses it for anything in the consumer space.
> But that whole business is practically dead,
Good riddance. The amount of scams in the long distance industry was baffling. Legend has it one of the companies named themself "I Don't Care" so if someone said that when asked which long distance carrier you wanted, that's who you got with their ridiculously expensive rates. Calling cards were just an extension of the same idea.
https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1998/09/02/i-don-t-care-lat...
They do exist, at least in some places: https://www.att.com/home-phone/landline/
Long distance plans were a regulatory invention that allowed customers to opt out of the local phone company's long distance service. Today those companies don't make monopoly profits (because everyone uses mobile phones and VoIP) so they price their bundled services reasonably. This pretty much kills the market for stand alone long distance plans, although they do seem to exist still. No market, no advertising.
The history of these early networks is really interesting. I was digging into the history of early radio networks and found some of the details of the dedicated circuits fascinating. NBC was actually created by AT&T.
Looks like the site has been hugged.
Funny how people hate these large monopolies, but they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
Relevant wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.
I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.)
The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house.
I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something.
If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.
I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables.
The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.
> It was ridiculously reliable.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties.
For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.
ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time.
Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities.
Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done.
And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?).
And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion.
Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either).
We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
Playing TFC, I always got faster ping times than the early cable users. ISDN was great.
I mean the old AT&T does exist. It’s called Verizon and it’s not that great.
Verizon decends from Bell ROCs, but not from the national AT&T company.
Current AT&T is the result of Bell ROCs buying out the national AT&T company.
But it's not the same company at all. The commitment to reliability is gone, the full vertical integration is gone, the monopoly revenues are gone. The market for phone calls is quite different as well.
It's a shame to have lost reliability and the increase in latency for audio is objectively bad and I don't know if we'll ever get back to near zero added latency on phone calls. Otoh, telecom competititon has driven much more capable and less expensive offerings, when they work.
Those are lovely rose-colored glasses! :) My understanding is that they also charged high rates for calling the next city, and more for calling further, opposed / dragged their heels on new tech like broadband data .... Since then we have essentially free communication - voice, video, and text - anywhere in the world, several broadband technologies, cell phones, endless VOIP options, faxes (did AT&T support those?) ... in fact, landlines are mostly gone.
Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.
> they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.
Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.
There are some very cool videos on YouTube[1] showing what the insides of these bunkers looked like.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmm-epqkmoQ