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One of my favorite games when traveling is spotting the iconic horn antennas that are still in operation or the various towers that were a part of it. A good chunk of the site are still in active use with all kinds of new equipment bolted onto them, and you can sometimes see holes in the platforms where the original horn antennas used to be mounted.
Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!
There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel
Somehow I was recommended the /r/longlines subreddit, so I subscribed. I now get pretty much a daily picture of a Long Lines abandoned tower somewhere in the country with upvotes and discussion. It is fascinating the hobbies people have.
This was a great article and put some context around it. It's interesting that many of these stations are basically apocalypse bunkers to keep equipment shielded for military use. There are many sites with the equipment still just sitting there untouched, slowly aging away.
> The era spawning from the 1950s throughout the 1980s can be considered the golden era of telecommunication
I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!
It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.
> all of the Long Line towers I’ve seen in person (like the Slater station) have sat abandoned since the early 1990s.
I know of a few in Idaho that were operational and maintained at least up until the 2010s ish.
The one I'm familiar with was for a ranger station and a scout camp tucked away in the mountains. It was only replaced because of infrastructure spending for rural telecom which happened around 08 crash. All the sudden for these rural telecoms it made sense to put in a line for miles up a mountain for 1 or 2 people.
I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.
i haven't had a landline for a loong time, so i'm curious -- do long distance phone plans even exist anymore?
there were so many TV ads and telemarketers pushing those plans that "the last long distance phone plan closed today" seems like it would've been a bigger story and the end-of-an-era.
The history of these early networks is really interesting. I was digging into the history of early radio networks and found some of the details of the dedicated circuits fascinating. NBC was actually created by AT&T.
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
I spent a few years maintaining microwave relay equipment in the 80s and the Long Lines network was genuinely impressive. The fault tolerance was incredible - you could lose two repeater stations and calls would automatically reroute through alternate paths. The tower climbing was terrifying though, especially in winter when ice would form on the waveguides.
I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.
I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
I think the monopoly model worked because Bell had guaranteed revenue and a long time horizon. They could fund Bell Labs for decades without quarterly earnings pressure. We try to do ambitious R&D now but investors want returns in 2-3 years max. Hard to invent the transistor on that timeline.
> they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.
Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.
I ran into this with a regional telecom project a few years back. We found that the monopoly structure let them plan 20-year infrastructure investments without worrying about quarterly earnings. The tradeoff was zero competitive pressure to innovate on customer experience. Once we split things up, we got better service options but lost the patient capital for big R&D bets like transistors or fiber optics.
But did anyone actually use this network at scale, or was it mostly dark fiber for the backbone? The article glosses over utilization rates — microwave seems great until you realize atmospheric conditions probably made reliability a nightmare compared to what came after.
Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!
There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel