Re:Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders...
by notatoad on Monday December 18, 2017 @02:53PM
(#15954847)
my aunt and uncle's farm in interior BC had this setup until the late 90s, well into the 56K modem era. Remember other people in your house yelling at you to turn off the internet because they had to use the phone? Imagine that scaled up to a dozen houses :)
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Re:Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders...
by sandworm101 on Monday December 18, 2017 @07:25PM
(#15956754)
Small world. I spent some long weekends at a cabin on green lake (BC interior) with a party line.
Party lines used standard telephone lines. The joke was that they had nothing to do with the cost of the wire. The cost of the wire is a tiny part of the cost of installing the system. It was the phone company not wanting to install the switching gear. Sometimes the party line was tied together within BC-Tell's box. So when they installed better switching gear everyone suddenly had their own line. That's different than barbwire rigs that ran over single lines. (BC-Tell is now called "telus")