Telephone calls for all
The ideal telephone service, one supposes, would make it possible to pick up any telephone in the world, dial the number for any other telephone and, having been instantly connected, talk for as long as one liked.
No one is yet planning for this ideal but there are three developments in telephony which are bringing it nearer. The first facilities by which a British subscriber can dial their own trunk calls 鈥� direct calls without the need to be directed via an operator between cities with different area codes 鈥� are scheduled for 1959. The first fully electronic telephone exchange may appear in public service in 1961. And the use of radio links for internal telephone routes may, one day, come into service and additionally help to reduce costs.
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Bristol is the city that has been chosen for the first 鈥渟ubscriber trunk-dialling鈥� service. Between 7000 and 10,000 subscribers will be able to dial direct calls to most of the large cities in Britain. The rate at which this scheme will spread will depend on the success of the experiment.
The other factor contributing to the success of trunk-dialling is the use of automatic telephone exchanges, which will soon be perfected and increasingly replace human operators. When this happens, along with radio telephone links to allow direct dialling to places such as Orkney, the whole nation will be connected to the same system.
But how will this affect the subscriber in the long term? With the introduction of trunk-dialling the current time-limited, three-minute call will probably be abandoned and replaced by a system of charges based on time multiplied by distance. In call boxes, for example, there may well be a method whereby one inserts a coin in the box and the call is cut off after a period of time. There may even be a time in the foreseeable future when a flat rate for all UK telephone calls becomes a reality.
From The New 杏吧原创, 7 February 1957