atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Telecom Service & Providers Party Lines

Looking through a few BSP's...setting up the ringer for "party lines" crops up a lot.

What exactly is a party line?

The old rural 8 party lines were the most common. I don't know if there's any left or not, doubt it. There's still two party lines, but I'll bet there isn't too many of them left either.

Thanks Bill, but what are they?

Ok, I got it from Wiki. So, up to eight customers could use the same loop? That's less overhead for the Telco for sure.

with no privacy , you pick up your phone and you join any call in progress. when you heard someone pick up you where supposed to try to end your call ASAP so as to give them the line

each party would be assigned a separate bell frequency and the CO would send a ring signal by frequency so as to ring only the phones at the dialed subscriber

that's one reason you find a lot of 500 and 2500 sets with the bells disconnected when someone was (illegally ) adding a extension

(I have a ring generator in the warehouse that rings all the frequencies )

they had party lines around here until the mid 90's

Less overhead, perhaps but a troubleshooting nightmare. A minor wiring issue at any one of the eight locations would knock everyone out of service. This meant that the telco had to roll a truck to locations that could easily be miles apart. Also, the phones had to be telco-issued with the proper ringer frequency/setup, so there was no such thing as customer provided equipment. Actually, when people tried to do their own wiring or provide their own phones, they screwed things up for everybody.

When I was young we had a party line and used regular phones no special ringer. Each person had their own ring sequence ours was 2 long and a short the next door neighbors was 4 short rings. The bad part was you heard every ring the good part was if you were at the neighbors house you could answer your own ring.

Here in Bell country we didn't use frequency, it was positive & neg tip and pos and neg ring. So you'd hear two rings your's and your partners. So party 1 would be pos tip and get 1 ring and party 4 (1's partner) would get pos tip with 2 rings. Using freq all would get one ring. What Merritt discribed we had when I was a kid and I believe those were 10 party lines.

Two party is just tip party and ring party and are usually on bridge lifters.

now that I think about it maybe that was all AE (GTE) stuff I was working on with the frequency ringers

Pick up the phone and join any call in progress! HA! Wow, I definetly can see how that would be a problem, ten times more today then it would back in the day, since I find people on the whole less courteous today then in the past.

I would have to knock down my neighbours door to get them off the phone.