Think ‘Ma Bell’ here, 1970s and earlier. In addition to the two phones we rented (everyone rented phones from the phone company back then) we had a couple which weren’t paid for. My father, who was an electrical engineer, had the idea that the phone company could tell that we had more handsets than we were supposed to by monitoring the current passing through our line when the phone rang. For this reason he kept the bells on the “unlicensed” phones (they were all standard Western Electric models) disconnected.
I know that in 1968 the FCC released a ruling that allowed you to connect third-party devices to the network (I’m assuming he wasn’t familiar with this ruling, but he’s no longer around to ask), but, prior to this, did they ever monitor peoples lines for this? If so, what was the penalty, and was it usually enforced?
They could ring your phone, watch the back-emf from the bell, and determine how many bells you had.
In college in the late 70’s I shared a room and we had two phones wired up, but were paying for only one phone. (No idea where the spare phone came from.) One day we got a call and my roommate answered. It was Ma, who accused us of having two phones. He asked why they believed that, and they explained that they could see two bells ringing. His quick answer: “Oh, we added a bell, because you can’t hear the phone ring from everywhere.” They added a small charge to our monthly statement for “extra bell”. I wouldn’t have been so quick on my feet.
Yes, by checking the inductive load on the lines much as Learjeff says. We actually had an auxiliary ringer, left over from the prior owners, and periodically Ma Bell would call us up asking about extra phones on our lines. They’d make a note about the ringer and move on, but a couple of years later, they’d check again.
“Our lines” being the falsehood, there. Ma owned everything right to the handset in those days.
Ringer Equivalence Numbers ceased having much meaning years ago, with all phones going to electronic ringers. I think the standard was 5 REN, meaning four or five mechanical ringers or their equivalents. A 5-REN line would probably power 100 or more modern phones.
So was this something done automatically by the switching system, or did a technician/auditor have to manually put a meter on each line and monitor it?
Through about 1970, probably the latter, although switches had readily-accessible test ports for such things. After electronic switches came into wider use, I’d bet the testing function was integrated into the box and ran automatically or semi-so.
When I was a kid, my mother worked for Western Electric and at one point, I wanted a toy phone. But not a crappy Fisher-Price phone but a real one to use as a toy. So she brought one home from the office, but the guys in the shop had disabled the ringer and made her promise not to connect it to the phone system. (Eventually, we did, though, even though it didn’t ring.)
Another thing. My parents were enthusiastic phone users. When all phones were still line-powered, we had a ridiculous number of phones in the house. I remember that at one point, the ringtone was a sickly thing, because all of those phones were drawing so much current.
I was in a project converting a large industrial site from an antique phone switch to Cisco VoIP technology. They had to swap out all the shop phones from the antique dial-a-number to touchtone, and even some antique touchtone did not work; there was a Cisco box that provided telephone lines for remote phones, but it did not have enough power to rig the bells. IIRC - Modern touchtone uses 24V not 48V, and a LOT less amperage. You could hear the old phones buzzing, but the current was not strong enough to make the hammer hit the bell. If you turned the phone on its side so gravity helped pull the hammer, the phone gave off a weak ring.
No wonder it was easy to detect and count the bells… (the bells, the bells!). No wonder the phone company wanted to keep a handle on how much power a line consumed.
Ring voltage and loop voltage are two different things. Ring is ~90V at 20Hz (unless you’re on a more-than-2-customer party line), while loop is ~48V DC.
The inside-facing parts of customer-owned phone systems can do whatever they want, but if they’re plain old “cheapie chirper” phones, they need to work with the above voltages.
Disconnecting ringers was the trick. In my dorm we had one legit phone, and about 8 illegal ones hooked up. We disconnected the ringers on all but maybe two of them, both to avoid detection and to avoid deafening us when 8 phones went off at once down the hallway.
However, this was MIT so the phone company pretty much had given up.
It was pretty prevalent. When a bunch of us rented a house and the guy came to hook up our legit phone, his last words were “you can hook up your other phones now.”
Because my mother worked for the phone company, it didn’t cost her anything for things like having a technician come out and install wall jacks. So they had jacks everywhere, including the bathroom.
In Ann Arbor MI, it was still done by a tecnician when I got caught in 1977.
Pretty shortly after that, Ma Bell’s monopoly on phone ownership was busted, and the RJ11 connector was the technical solution to all those problems Bell was trying to avoid. (OK, OK, I’m oversimplifying, but Bell’s reason for wanting to own the phones was based on a business model, not a technical requirement, as we all found out when the transition went smoothly.)
Externally powered phones such as a cordless phone base unit may have a low REN but an analogue ringer in a phone could still be up to 0.8 REN. See this Wikipedia article. Even the low REN may be 0.1, so only 50 devices on one line
Back to the OP. Placing bell sets in parallel, such as just hooking up extra phones on the line increased the capacitance as well as inductance across the line. A simple line test was conducted by reversing the polarity of the feed voltage on the line. By measuring the current “kick” when that was done, you can get an idea if the capacitance is around the expected value of 2 uF or roughly double or even higher if more phones were connected. By wiring the bells in series through one capacitor, the capacitance was kept at the correct value and the line test would only show the normal value. In New Zealand this was known as “plan” wiring. There were various plans for different types of phones and different exchanges. For example, if the line was a party line, then it would be expected to have more capacitance than normal, and the phones could be wired differently to reduce that.
Up to 1990ish, although all phones were rented from the telephone provider, the NZPO (New Zealand Post Office) or latterly Telecom NZ, and so it was expected to pay extra if you had more than one phone, I’m sure any number of people had more phones than they paid for, and the NZPO billing was so error plagued that no one was disconnected for extra phones. If you got found out, you just argued that you’d always had the extra and it was their fault for not billing you. And that could well be true. If someone moved out and left an extra phone behind, when you got connected, if the PO didn’t know about the phone, who was going to tell them?
They did used to sell ringerless phones in the 70s; you could hook them into the line and the phone company couldn’t detect them. In many cases, they were just fine: you’d hear the ring from the main phone and pick up the ringerless extension.
You were allowed to connect third party equipment, but you had to tell them that you were doing so. And they would charge you for doing so.
Thus, many of us decided to not tell them.
I, too, believed that they could tell how many phones were on the line when it was ringing (if they cared to check), and folks said the “phantom rings” we sometimes got were for checking just that (a single ring or even half-ring, with nobody calling).
Got no proof, no first-hand evidence, nothing.
The FCC Part 68 rules were not introduced until 1975. Following court challenges and appeals, the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) registration program began in late 1977. Most people were effectively banned from attaching their own phones until then.
It’s hard to understand now how much AT&T got away with. They got the FCC to ban the Hush-a-Phone which was essentially a plastic cylinder (non-electrical) that you placed over the phone receiver to help you talk in a noisy room. AT&T called it a “foreign attachment.” It took a federal appeals court ruling to overturn it.
It wasn’t until the 1968 Carterphone decision that you could even use an acoustic coupler to connect CPE to your phone.
But another issue was that Western Electric did not sell its equipment to the public until the 1984 divestiture. (They did begin to sell some novelty covers for phones, but you still had to rent the working parts from the phone company.) If you had a Western Electric phone before then, it was stolen property.
My father was too. It was disconcerting to call him at home and wonder if he was answering while on the toilet.