The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96

Dial tone is pretty simple in concept.  It is… or was… a sound that the central office switch broadcasts over the line when you pick up your phone that lets you know that the phone and line are operative and the system it ready for you to dial a number.

Things that come to my mind when I hear the phrase “dial tone”

I say “or was” because it is something that only exists for phones physically connected to the public phone network by a pair of copper wires.  It is not something that makes any sense in regard to your cell phone or a voice over IP (VoIP) situation, though many devices will actually play the familiar (to old people) sound we grew up with.  I had a Pingtel VoIP desktop phone that would play a looped .wav file whenever you picked up the handset.  It had nothing to do with the phone being ready to do anything.  It was more an acknowledgement that it was plugged in and powered on.

For a long stretch, dial tone was an incredibly important aspect of the post war phone system, especially in the United States.  The end of the war and the beginning of a 20 year run of economic growth and prosperity meant everybody was going to want ,and eventually be able to afford, to have a phone installed in their home.

The pre-war phone system depended on an army of operators to route calls by physically making connections on a switchboard.  That was a system that absolutely would not scale.  So a grand strategy was devised to automate most of the system.  I wrote previously about area codes and what they meant.

All of this started to be put together in the late 40s and had come to about 80% fruition by the late 60s.  Bell Labs had come up with new technologies, including the T-carrier technology that, through the magic of time time division multiplexing, could carry 24 to 672 simultaneous phone calls on a single trunk line.  They laid trunk lines along the railway right of ways because the railroads were happy enough to get a little bit of cash and that was easier and cheaper than putting up new poles or towers or trying to bury trunks elsewhere.

Phone switches across the country were slowly updated and upgraded, and the dial tone was the tip of the spear for this transition, the sound that told you that the phone was good to go once there wasn’t an operator always at the other end of the line ready to connect your call.

By the 70s most of North America was wired up, with only some rural outliers still needing to get operator assistance for things like long distance calling… my grandparent’s farm being in one of those areas… and things were going good for AT&T, which owned the phone lines, rented you the phone, and sent a monthly bill to most US phone customers.

There were still some enhancements coming in the 70s.  Touch Tone dialing, which was initially sold as a premium, extra cost service to customers even though it benefited AT&T greatly, showed up and began to spread as did the local area calling plan.

The local area calling plan was a flat rate monthly fee that let you call, without toll, phone numbers within a specific radius of your location.  Or, more accurately, within a specific radius of the phone switch at the central office to which you were connected.  In most places, any call that was within your central office or an adjacent, directly connected central office, was no additional charge, but bouncing further than that incurred a per minute connection charge.

It was fairly generous and cheap enough that most people bought it, yet profitable enough that it benefited AT&T the way a subscription plan benefits an MMORPG: It makes for nice, predictable income and most of your users barely access the system enough to make the price worthwhile, so it is a win for the company.

By the 90s, after the chaos of the breakup of AT&T, the long distance wars, and the beginning of the reformation of the monopoly through the mergers of the regional bell operating companies (RBOCs) that were the successor businesses to AT&T, things were humming along pretty well.

As I noted in my post about starting a BBS, the connectivity to the system had been modularized and the local phone companies were happy, even anxious, to add another phone line to your house, apartment, and business.  The built-in phone services, referred to as Centrex commercially, gave the RBOCs lots of add on services to sell, including voice mail at the phone switch so you could ditch your answering machine, along with things like call waiting and such.

It was a golden era for them.

Sure, there were these mobile phones showing up, but they still had to connect… and pay to connect… to the public phone network.  They were also rare, being both expensive and awkward to deal with.  They were referred to as “car phones” for a few years because you needed a car to power them reliably.  The alternative was a “mobile” phone the size and approximate weight of a brick due to the battery technology of the time.

And then came the internet.

At first that was no big deal.  The phone company was happy, as mentioned, to install a new phone line for you and the population of modem users was small.  They were also seen as outliers, because a business that needed a data line would pay for a leased line, a pinned up connection between two points that would be dedicated to and certified for data transmission, though the extent to which a leased line was better, much less different, than a normal phone line could boarder on dubious in some circumstances.  But the phone company said it was better, and in some cases required you pay for one, if you wanted to do data transmission over the phone network.

Online services, while growing during the 80s, did not tip the balance.  The phone system had been built and honed to near perfection from the view of the phone company, which meant it had been sized on decades of user data that indicated that most people didn’t make long phone calls.  Or very many phone calls.  For every teen annoying their parents by hanging on the line for hours with their friends saying, “no, you hang up first” there were a lot of people, hundreds to thousands, who averaged less than 2 minutes per call.

The system was built on that data, predicated on the idea that we didn’t have much to say and that we would say it quickly and move on.  That stable state was not initially perturbed by the slow increase of modem users.

To paraphrase Hemingway, online and internet users of the phone system showed up slowly, then all at once.

In 1994 when services like AOL were growing and connection to the internet was part of their appeal, there was no real problem.  By 1996, in Silicon Valley on a weekday evening, you could pick up your phone handset and expect to wait from 20 seconds to several minutes to get a dial tone.  The solid, reliable phone, a staple of your life, was suddenly not there for you on demand.  Picking up a handset and not hearing the dial tone… was just weird.

This was no longer a few nerds hogging the home phone line and getting mad when a parent or roommate pick up the handset and broke their modem connection.  This was, according to the New York Times (article not pay walled for once), an “Immediate Threat” to the phone system.  From the article:

The sudden shift in use, phone companies say, means that millions of ordinary callers — who have come to regard instant access to the phone network as a birthright — are facing busy signals or long delays in getting a dial tone.

Growing Internet use “poses an immediate threat to the capacity of the public switched telephone network,” concludes a recent study from Bellcore, the research arm of the U.S. regional Bell operating companies.

The study predicts ominously that callers and Net surfers alike have not yet begun to experience the worst of frustrating delays. Over the next five years, Bellcore said, the volume of Internet traffic carried by the local phone network will jump to two to five times current levels.

The post-war equilibrium was falling apart and Bellcore, which among other things published all those expensive blue bound manuals that dictated all the specifications for the public telephone network, said things were bad and were only going to get worse.

At the time I was living by myself in a two bedroom apartment in Mountain View (rent then, $750 a month, rent now $6,000 a month) around the corner from where the Netscape balloon was inflating rapidly due to all of this interest in the internet and web browsers. I would get home from work, boot up my computer, dial into my ISP (Best.com,carefully chosen because they were hosted in the same central office as my phone line, which meant I might actually get that 28.8Kbps connection modems were promising) once I got a dial tone, and stay logged in pretty much all evening because who knew if I could get connected again if I signed off.  I would be playing TorilMUD or reading web sites or sending email or arguing with people on Usenet.

And more and more people were doing what I was doing.  Obsessions with checking email and all of that was driving more and more people to stay online all the time.

Disaster was looming.

Yet it never really appeared.  Part of that was the phone companies, fearing the gaze of regulators, something explicitly mentioned in that article, actually dipped into their huge profits and began upgrading their networks.  This went surprisingly smoothly because many of the upgrades had been sized and planned, but then put off because why spend money now when things are fine?

Also beginning to show up were alternatives to the old phone network.  In 1993 a mobile phone was a brick-like device.  By 1997 the Motorola flip phone… the first one, not the retro re-introductions… was making mobile phones more manageable and more affordable.  They were still comically large even when compared to the Nokia candy bar phones everybody had a few years later, but they were viable and serious on the road sales people… like my soon to be wife… began carrying them in greater numbers.

Then there were the alternatives to modems beginning to arrive.  Cable TV based internet connectivity showed up, offering fast and always on connections.  And the phone companies themselves started to offer things like ADSL, which still used their phone network, but which didn’t tie up phone lines slots on at the central office and which, best of all, could be rented to you for more than a phone line.

In the end, two years down the line, people barely remembered that there was ever a problem.  We all still had land lines, and many still had modems… 56K modems by that point… but the crisis had passed, the way it often does here in the states.  We’re bad and doing anything even a minute before we have to, but once we set our minds to it the task gets done.

But there was that stretch of time… barely remembered at this point… when the old reliable dial tone suddenly wasn’t reliable any more.