A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.