Voip Blog
How Quickly Calls Are Connected
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Hunting around on the Bell Memorial site, I found a recording of a typical long distance call from 1949. The call originated from Los Angeles and being made to Murphy, Idaho. Granted, it's an excerpt from the radio version of Dragnet, but given how Jack Webb was a stickler for getting the details right, I have no reason to believe this call wasn't a representative sample of long distance calling of the day.
What I like about this audio clip is that you get to hear how the call was manually routed from one place to another. There were a number of human operators involved in the process. You could hear the entire routing process, from initial call to a pickup at the other end.
So how long did it take before the call was connected? Almost 2 minutes. There was even an offer by the operator to call him back once the call was connected! That is simply unheard of in this day and age, but it was very common with long distance calls back in the late 1940s.
Why were manual operators needed? Because even the automated switches of the day were only used to process local calls. Long distance calls needed help from manual operators to, quite literally, connect a series of cords between the caller and the recipient. Because there was no direct route between Los Angeles and Murphy, Idaho, it required a series of operators to be involved to cross-connect circuits so the two parties could communicate.
Today, calling long distance is as quick--and inexpensive--as calling down the street. Calls are routed in just a few seconds--automatically. Even International calls are routed with only a few seconds delay! And with voip.com's low rates, you can call a lot more often than you did in the older days!
