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.
How to keep something working and resilient 24/7/365 is extremely fascinating to me, and a lot of the old Long Lines stuff was built with the idea of attempting to survive a possible nuclear war. Even the reason why locations were chosen were part of that.
The Idea Factory is a worthwhile read. One of the concepts that AT&T operated on during monopoly times seemed to be focused on providing a “gold-plated” premium service.
My understanding was that MCI rolled in and set up dollar-store version of Long Lines, with sound quality to match. They used that as the basis to challenge AT&Ts monopoly to steamroll shitty service everywhere.
The cream-skimming that happened with profit-first MCI resulted in the loss of a resilience mindset and long-term planning for a national network.
I've gotten sucked into 1950s/60s/70s Pan Am (the defacto U.S. flag carrier of the era) advertising videos and the concept is similar to AT&T: premium service, basically a monopoly.
Problem is: prices were REALLY high.
Competition worked out in Part 121 airlines and telco, in the long run.
Fun fact for the young: Sprint (long before being bought by T-Mobile) was primarily a long-distance company, and they advertised that the sound quality was "so good you could hear a pin drop". Many ads featured this bouncing pin (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cbzf9amfo from 1986).
The logo they used until just before the buyout was a stylized image of a pin falling down.