2024-10-26 buy payphones and retire

I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers, and hardened telephone exchanges were...

Prescript: I originally started writing this with the intent to send it out to my supporter's newsletter, EYES ONLY, but it got to be long and took basically all day so I feel like it deserves wider circulation. You will have to tolerate that it begins in the more conversational tone I use for the supporters newsletter. I am going to write a bit...

According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio technology means that modern communications standards...

We currently find ourselves in something of a series, working our way from private lines to large private line systems like the four-wire private-line national warning system. Let's continue to build on the concept of the private line into large corporate systems. In principle, a large organization in want of a private telephone system could...

Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed the extensive and variable products that AT&T and telephone operating companies sold as private lines. One of the interesting properties of private line systems is that they can be ordered as four-wire. Internally, the telephone network handles calls as four-wire with separate talk and listen pairs (or...