[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

I remember the "olden days" when 100% of all telephone equipment was owned by Bell Telephone. We were only allowed to rent the phone in our home every month, and long distance was crazy expensive. It was actually illegal for me to hook my 300 BAUD modem I owned to the phone system on a home line!

Bell telephone was broken up, and they reassembled themselves back into AT&T and have lots of competition. Long distance is now free, and that huge chunk of income is just rolled into the cost of internet and phone service.

Yep. We moved into a townhome in Pensacola in the early 80s. We had a phone from the telco. We had or had purchased a phone for some reason. There was a line in my parents bedroom. I think dad had to tinker with the wires a bit, but got the phone to work up there. The telco called at some point "You are renting one telephone from us, but when you receive a call, we see two rings on the line. You can't have a second telephone that you don't rent from us."
I think my parents ended up leaving it unplugged and then plugged it in when they wanted to use it. We were there for ~3 - 3.5 years and then moved. By the time we came back to the US, things were no longer like that, IRRC.