Telecom Informer

    

by The Prophet

Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!

For the longest time in recent memory, it was a relatively "normal" summer.  The cedar trees around the Central Office aren't dying from dehydration this year, and leaves are falling at the normal rate, at around the normal times.  This means lots of big maple leaves, which litter the parking lot and the windshield of my car.  Naturally, they stick like glue and have to be manually removed by yours truly in the pouring rain.  But hey, that's life in the Great Northwest.

On the way in the door today, I almost tripped over something I haven't seen in awhile: a phone book.  Yes, someone actually and un-ironically delivered a phone book to the phone company.  In this area, a printed directory still exists, somehow, although it's published by a small private local publisher rather than by my employer.  This makes me realize that a lot of younger readers may have never seen a phone book outside of a museum, and also may have never made a call to directory assistance.

These days, if you need to find a product or service, your first stop is probably an Internet search engine (whether accessed on your computer or directly through your mobile phone).  However, around the turn of the century (it feels so weird to stay that!), Internet searches were rudimentary.  Even though it was the peak of the "dot com bubble," only limited amounts of information were available online.  If you needed to find a phone number, you'd look it up in the phone book or you'd call directory assistance.

When you subscribed to telephone service, by default on a 1FR, your name, address, and phone number would appear in the next published White Pages.  The White Pages contained (and in some cases still contain) residential and business listings, but not government listings which were included in the Blue Pages.  Without paying for additional services, you were allowed to publish only your first initial and last name, and to only list the city of your address, but any more privacy than that required an additional "non-published" or "unlisted" service charge.  What was the difference?  If you opted for "unlisted" service (USOC NL), you wouldn't be listed in the White Pages, but your number would still be available through directory assistance.  If you opted for "non-published" service (USOC NP), you'd be kept out of both the phone book and directory assistance.

Business lines would get a listing in both the White Pages and the Yellow Pages, but phone companies made a lot of money with display advertising in the Yellow Pages, which was essential to get noticed in any sort of competitive category such as household services (plumbers, electricians, etc.).  This was one of their primary sources of revenue, and it was over a $20 billion business circa 2000 (by comparison, Google is currently estimated to make over $150 billion in the U.S. annually).  Surprisingly, directory publishing is (somehow) estimated to still be a billion dollar business!  A lot of folks in their 60s and up still aren't comfortable going online, and still use phone books.

Telephone directories are a hyper-local business, although there was occasional competition where independents operated.  Directories typically covered a city or municipal area.  For example, in the Seattle area during the post AT&T (((breakup))) "US West" era, there were separate telephone directories for Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, and Bellevue-Eastside.  However, GTE operated in the area; they published a Kirkland-Redmond-Bellevue directory which covered their territories.  Businesses in the area tended to advertise in both the US West and GTE "Yellow Pages" so they could be found throughout their service area.

What if you didn't have a phone book, or you wanted the phone number of someone whose number was unlisted (but not non-published)?  And what if you needed a number that was out of your area, and for which you didn't have the phone book?  That's where directory assistance came into play.  The magic number was 555-1212; you'd call 1-555-1212 for your local directory assistance, and 1-NPA-555-1212 for long distance directory assistance.  Local directory assistance was handled by your local phone company, and long distance directory assistance was typically provided by AT&T.  In 1998, local directory assistance cost 60 cents per call (after one free call per month) in the US West service territory.  Long distance directory assistance cost $1.50 per call.  AT&T also operated a toll-free directory assistance service at 1-800-555-1212, which provided toll-free numbers at no charge.  However, businesses with toll-free numbers were charged to list their numbers in the toll-free directory.

In the early 2000s, voice services on mobile phones started to become inexpensive (with unlimited night and weekend minutes available on many plans), meaning people were making a lot more phone calls on the go - and a lot more phone calls from mobile phones in general.  This meant a lot more directory assistance charges, because people rarely carried phone books around with them.  Starting in the late 1990s and continuing into the early 2000s, the phone number of directory assistance also changed to 411, which made calling even easier.

Unfortunately, as a percentage, a lot more directory assistance calls failed to deliver because mobile phone numbers were all non-published.  Also, from a mobile phone, directory assistance calls were all charged at the long distance rate (even for local numbers), and you had to pay whether or not they had the number you wanted.  Making matters worse, phone companies got creative with directory assistance.  They'd offer to connect you to the number after reading it rather than you having to hang up and dial it yourself, but this meant you were connected at a high, operator-handled rate!

All of the charges and shenanigans led to bill shock for consumers, and gave rise to services offering free ad-funded directory assistance.  One such company, Jingle Networks, launched 1-800-FREE-411 in 2005 and, by 2008, had grown to handling approximately 20 million calls per month.  The service wasn't great, was driven by automated voice recognition technology, and it wasn't particularly accurate, but it was free and this made it popular.

Just as quickly as the business grew, though, it began to shrink.  Around the same time, 3G data services and the iPhone launched.  With the proliferation of more capable smartphones, search engines created online directories.  These were overall pretty good and accurate, and a lot easier to use than a phone book.  Consumers could look up numbers themselves on their smartphones rather than having a directory service operator do it for them.

And that leads us to the world of today.  I'm not sure what to do with this third-party telephone directory, full of questionable business listings, which was crudely printed offshore on low quality paper.  Maybe I'll look in the landscaping category and see whether someone there can handle all of these leaves.

In the meantime, enjoy your autumn, drive carefully, and I'll see you in the winter.