Voice
Communication in Business Volume 1
Essays on telecommunications,
1969-1980
Chapter 1
Searching for the
Telephone Company
The reaction of the
telephone industry to Carterphone took on many forms. It did not,
however, inspire telephone people to enter the new competitive arena
with zeal and gusto. In the following true story, first published in
Business Communications Review in the September-October, 1976,
issue, the whole tone for the decade is set. The events take place
in March, 1969. Only the names have been changed to protect the
innocent.
***
The furniture store wasn't quite open. The
doors were unlocked but people with brooms were at work just inside,
giving the impression that we weren't supposed to be there. We went
through the outside doors and approached a bank of elevators. The
one we chose wasn't suitable: sales people crowded into it on the
way to their posts. We were directed to the "express" elevators and,
after a wait, found ourselves in a hallway high above the city,
searching for The Telephone Company.
One wall was covered with advertisements for
various telephone services. They were very well done, and I made a
note to pick up a handful on the way out. After several false turns,
we entered the office space occupied by The Telephone Company, a
huge bullpen with desks studding a surface that stretched away into
the distance. Hank rose to greet us, and his boss appeared shortly
amid a barrage of pleasantries.
"We don't have a conference room," Hank told
us, "but we can go upstairs where an office is available." Sam had
bet Jock and me that they would use somebody's office, and his smug
expression showed that he knew he had won. We filed out, making our
way up one flight of stairs. The office wasn't half bad but we
didn't try to sit up to the desk which, of course, had the kneehole
on the opposite side and no overhang.
Hank gave his presentation. He had ten
flip-charts, seven of which had been hand-lettered with obvious
haste. Those remaining were maps. We wanted a switch in The City to
concentrate expensive long-haul tie lines, handle local tandem
switching and, hopefully, help in the more efficient use of
operators. It soon became obvious that Hank wanted to sell us
something else.
The first flip-chart showed the basis for
comparing possibilities. The optimum switch would be based on
location, trunking, floor space and real estate. The present switch,
which we hoped to replace, was located in a small room
inconveniently situated in a building with only a few years
remaining on its lease. The small room was full to overflowing, with
circuits literally hanging from the walls. Only one switchman at a
time could work in the cramped space, as we had seen the day before.
Thus, real estate and floor space were important.
Hank had chosen four locations for
comparison, including the present switch site. These were ordered on
a one through four basis, with one being good, in each of the four
categories. This meant, of course, that the present site got a four
for floor space and real estate, while another location, considered
by Jock, Sam and me to be the best, got a four for trunking due to
the extra length of tie lines to access it. The extra tie lines
would cost $3,000 a month, but at least the job could be done. The
present site was impossible, but four equals four.
Hank progressed to the point where he added
up his order factors, treating them like weighting factors. To the
surprise of all, all locations came out equally bad: two had two
fours and two ones, while the remaining two had two threes and two
twos. Hank broke the tie by letting the tie line cost put double
"weighting" on the trunking item. In this way, the existing site won
although it couldn't even be considered. The site that came in
second was on another leased property; a switch room could easily be
built there (at our expense) on an internal parking area. Hank
detected our wavering interest.
After the flip-chart presentation had run its
course, jock asked mildly about four-wire switching, translation and
alternate routing, and several other factors which we had placed on
the agenda. We had written a letter carefully outlining the topics
for discussion before we had crossed the continent to attend this
meeting. The four-wire switching was important in that it would
improve voice transmission and, at the same time, open the door to
full-duplex data operation. The situation was simply resolved:
four-wire switching was impossible.
An elderly gentleman who had so far made no
comments asked why we were interested in four-wire switching: Jock
told him.
"We condition data circuits to 2,000 bits per
second," the elderly gentleman said. "We can't go to 2,400 on
switched circuits."
The E.G. (elderly gentleman) sat up. "You
just give us the specification you really want, and we can do
anything with two-wire that you can do with four-wire switching."
"Full duplex?"
"No. We can't do full duplex, of course. But
we can condition lines to handle whatever you want."
"How do you condition lines?" I asked. Data
isn't my end of the business, but the previous day, Sam had stated
that conditioning a circuit for data consisted in hanging a green
tag on the proper terminals at the main distributing frame.
"Well, we do whatever it takes to bring the
line up to C2 or C3 or whatever you want." The alpha-numeric
designations didn't mean anything to me, but Sam appeared to have
scored again. "But physically—what do you do?" I persisted. "Put in
amplifiers, equalizers, or what?"
"We do whatever is needed."
"But what's the major problem in such cases?
Phase shift? Gain?"
"Gain," the E.G. said firmly. I let the
conversation lapse.
Meanwhile, Jock was pulling out a set of
notes from his brief case. "One of the things we want to do," he
said, "is open up the tie line network to user dialing. We want to
let everybody—or almost everybody—dial anywhere on-net, directly.
But we still want our operators to control off-net calls."
"You're going to have routing problems," one
of the telephone people said.
"That's why we wanted to talk about
translation and automatic routing," I answered.
"We can always give new routing
instructions," Jock pointed out, "on paper. But we want to relieve
the operator load in placing tie line calls; that's why we want to
open the network to users directly. But we don't want people to go
off-net in Boston or Atlanta to talk to Aunt Minnie. We want
restrictors, to begin with, at this tandem point so that anybody who
dials a long-haul tie line and follows a PBX code with an off-net
code like "9" will end up at an operator here or on 120 IPM."
"No problem," said Hank.
"It might be a problem," Sam cut in. "The
switch will be under local telephone control, while the circuits
will be long-haul. Will the long-haul company let you put
restrictors on their tie lines?" When he had worked for Major Tel,
Sam had had exactly this sort of problem. But even a speaker-phone
call to our National Account Manager failed to turn up an objection,
although a restrictor on outgoing tie lines, bypassed by operator
access, took some explanation. We accepted the possibility of
actually getting restriction as we wanted—but we kept our fingers
crossed.
"Of course, if you had CCSA, you wouldn't
need restriction," Hank said.
"We'd like to try CCSA, as a matter of fact,"
Jock answered. "You'll note in the letter that we wanted a
discussion of central office switching for our tie lines, as well as
on-prem switching. We have a little less than 200 tie lines here,
and it seems as though you might be able to take them into a central
office and switch them there."
"Well," said Hank, "we have to have a least
two switch points for CCSA—it's a long haul offering, and we don't
have any tariff for a single switch."
"Not even as a temporary measure, or as a
trial to see if CCSA is what we want throughout the network?"
Another of the telephone people spoke up.
"Well," he said, "we have a pretty long waiting list for CCSA. We
have this committee that listens to requests for CCSA and then
decides who should have it. We could try taking your case before the
committee, I suppose, but we don't have a tariff. And it would take
21 months or so.
"Suppose you could give us a temporary
solution; perhaps a two-wire switch in Bankville," Jock said. "Could
we get a CO trunk-switch later without a big termination charge like
we had at the computer center's manual switchboard last year?"
"Well, there's always a termination charge,"
Frank said.
"But we had ordered an automatic switch. You
couldn't put it in so you gave us a manual board temporarily and
then socked us three thousand bucks to take it out when you put in
what we ordered in the first place." Jock laid a Xeroxed copy of the
bill on the desk.
"Well," said Hank smiling broadly, "that's
the way it goes. You wanted service in a hurry and we gave it to
you. But you had to pay through the nose."
We took a break for lunch. We were supposed
to meet with the technical people that afternoon to see if they had
any interesting responses to our needs as outlined in our letter.
After the morning session, we were a little let down; the afternoon
should be more interesting. After all, technical people would be in
a better position to appreciate what we wanted to do. We'd get down
to the mechanics of the thing, and something good would happen!
After a short walk to another building, we
rode up in an elevator. The Telephone Company seemed to have most of
the top of The City under lease. We detoured past the 10th floor to
pick up the technical people. Hank introduced us to Amy, a pleasant
lady who turned out to be a traffic engineer, and her boss. Another
individual was discovered to be a customer service engineer, but he
didn't say a single word all afternoon.
We went to the 11th floor, a large section of
which had been partitioned off with sliding flexible walls to make
conference rooms in various sizes and quantities. We were at a
corner of the building adjacent to a room in which a training
program was being conducted. The flexible walls allowed us to hear
the training sound track loud and clear. Only by having a lucky room
assignment did we miss the opportunity to hear interesting recorded
lectures from both sides at the same time.
As we walked into the room, Amy's boss said,
"Well, what are we going to talk about today? I guess this is just a
general discussion!"
"We'd like to cover some of the topics we
mentioned in our letter," Jock said. Hank pulled the letter out of
his brief case and handed it to Amy. She took it with interest.
"May we have a moment to look this over," she
asked, "or should we discuss the points one at a time?"
"Maybe we should just limit the discussion to
some form of CCSA versus a new switch at Bankville," Jock suggested.
"Then we could cover the points one at a time."
"Bankville? That's five miles away, isn't
it?" Amy asked. "We can't speak for that location. That's in another
area. We can only speak for the southern division."
The dialog ground along unprofitably. It was
impossible to discuss switching or transmission with only traffic
people present. And it was impossible to discuss sites for a tandem
switch outside the southern division. With some relief to all, the
discussion turned to abstract traffic.
"Our December traffic study from the National
Account Group was interesting," I said.
"Do you have it with you?" Amy asked.
"An unofficial copy," Jock pulled the stack
of traffic sheets out of his brief case. Amy looked at them
carefully. "They never send us anything," she said. "We just send
them the data and never hear from them again."
"This is the first study we've had in quite a
while, and some of the trunk groups are a little out of line," I
said.
"You mean there was a change since the May
study?"
I looked at Jock blankly. No one had sent us
anything for the previous 18 months. "We send it in every six
months," Amy said, "but we never hear from them."
"You're not the only one," I thought to
myself. "Look at the Regional Headquarters group," I continued out
loud. "It's running at 98% occupancy. There's no way on earth to
tell how much traffic was offered."
"Have you seen how that group will be
configured when the present modifications are completed?"
I shook my head.
"There will be six outgoing, six incoming,
and 12 two-way; and we'll have a new group from the Midwest."
"You mean," I said, "that with this kind of
an overload, you're going to reduce the traffic handling capacity of
the group by grading it? Now the 24 circuits are all one big group
and it's completely inadequate."
A voice behind me cut in. The flexible wall
had slid open, and a female head came through. "Please!" the head
said, sternly. "We have a class going on in here!"
"But we have a problem in here," I said,
somewhat abashed. The wall, however, had closed again, filtering my
protest. We spent a half an hour or so revising the year-old order,
trying to increase the capacity of the trunk group. We had to undo
the whole thing the following day, however, due to lack of switching
equipment at the distant end. The original idea had been to move the
Midwest traffic out of the long-haul group and into a group of its
own, reducing the overload to manageable proportions. But the
interlocking behavior of tie lines, switching centers, and orders to
various autonomous telephone companies required careful
consideration. It was not something to do in a hurry at a
conference.
The discussion languished. We asked Hank for
a definite proposal by the end of the month so that we could compare
it with a similar proposal from Major Tel and present both at an
internal meeting the following month. There was little enthusiasm on
Hank's part. Nothing could be done in less than 18 months, and then
we could probably get only two-wire step-by-step switching. CCSA
with a single switch was most unlikely and the end of the month was
very close.
We didn't say much as we walked back to the
car. Only when we blended into the expressway traffic jam was the
silence broken. "We ought to form our own telephone company!" Jock
said.
"One big company, just to switch tie lines
for businesses," Sam suggested.
"We could organize it like COMSAT—let the
carriers and users buy into it, and have one overall system designed
to handle business traffic," I added.
All the way back to the motel, we plotted and
schemed. At the end of the drive, we had a fairly good idea ready
for really careful consideration. The only thing that bothered us
was the possibility that some other telephone customer, similarly
inspired, would beat us to the punch.
***
By the end of the
decade, things had not improved greatly. True, National Account
Managers were assigned to major business customers, and the Bell
System marketing approach was rearranged to some extent, but the
results remained pretty much the same. As is well known to all
public relations people, it is much easier to create image than
reality.
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