[ Home ] [ Table of Contents ] [ About Lee Goeller ] [ Search ]

The Digital Future Of The Telephone Network
A Study of Evolving Technology
By Lee Goeller
Originally published by Probe Research Inc. 1979. Reprinted by permission

2005 Introduction

by Lee Goeller

I wrote The Digital Future of the Telephone Network during the summer of 1978. It was my last major effort on my old Royal upright, and it represented the end of that era. The business world was excited by the coming of competition and the thrill of new competitive long distance networks based on MICROWAVE instead of old-fashioned wires. Never mind that AT&T’s microwave network had gone coast-to-coast in 1951, dropping the price of long distance and making network TV possible. We were in for a revolution, and now the innovative, nimble small companies would show the hulking giant, AT&T, how to do telecom right.

But even a small telecom network is more complicated than it looks, and it seemed to me that few of the competitors and their potential customers realized what was actually involved. So I decided to write a paper that described the existing long distance network, how it had evolved, and what was likely to happen to it in the future. As a person who had worked for years on electronic switching, and who had been alerted to promising new technologies such as digital T-carrier and fiber optics, there were some facts, not in general circulation, that I thought telephone customers, and business customers in particular, might find useful.

The paper that emerged was appreciably longer than would fit into magazine format. Karl Kozarsky, who had been my boss’s boss at RCA and who had left before I did to seek greener pastures, put me in touch with Victor Schnee, who, via his company, Probe Research, Inc., was publishing business studies which emphasized not only financial perspectives, but technical ones as well. His associate at Probe was Walter Gorkiewicz who had been a scientist working in fiber optics at the RCA Sarnoff Labs at Princeton. Because it was evident that fiber optics would revolutionize telecommunications networks, they were eager to make my paper available. They edited it saw it through production.

It came out in August 1978, and by the end of November had sold over 200 copies. It continued to sell well through 1979, and on January 22, 1980, we did a seminar with the same name at the New York Biltmore. I talked about transmission and switching while Walter spoke movingly about the coming of optical fiber. This was the first of many successful seminars produced by Probe.

Today, Victor Schnee is president of a new company called Probe Financial Associates, Inc., and, supported by Alfred Bosschults, an expert with both business and technical competence in telecommunications, is continuing to provide the business community with reports and advice on telecom matters.

On preparing Digital Future for the web site, I read it carefully for the first time in 25 years. The curious relationship between the analog 1ESS with digital T-carrier trunks face to face with digital 4ESS switches with analog long distance trunks was something I had completely forgotten. It must be remembered that it took a while to develop fiber optics to the point where it could work over long distances. Not until Feb. 10, 1983, was AT&T’s first “digital island,” extending from Washington DC to New York City, cut over for business. In this achievement, fiber optics provided T-carrier long distance trunks between 4ESS toll switches already in position along the route. A digital signal could now go from the output of one local central office to the input of another essentially unchanged. It was estimated that 60% of the telephones in the country had direct access to all-digital toll connections. MCI followed AT&T up the Northeast Corridor about a year later, and Sprint sold off its analog microwave network with a series of ads in industry magazines. But analog COs still blocked the customer from digital end-to-end dial-up connections.

Today (2005), of course, there is so much fiber optics in service that the price of long distance phone calls is almost zero. Many of the competitive carriers have gone bankrupt, AT&T is now a subsidiary of SBC and MCI is owned by Verizon. Soon the Internet will take over everything, and one wonders if anybody will be able to make a living in telephony. This is a digital future I certainly didn’t visualize in 1978.

[ Top ] [ Table of Contents ] [ Next Chapter ]