I watch a lot of Hawaii Five-O reruns, and every time McGarret gets a phone call from “off the island,” he yells into the phone (“Yeah, Danno, I can hardly hear ya”). Typically his long distance calls are from Honk Kong, Europe, or recently Miami.
So, if I were speaking to someone from several thousand miles away back in the early 70s, would we have had to yell at each other?
:smack:
AKA “Hong Kong”
Dunno, but transpacific cable service began in 1964. Before then, telephone calls between the U.S. mainland and Hawaii were done by two-way radio.
If you watch old movies and TV shows, even from the 50s, you’ll note that you had to “put in” a long distance call and wait for the operator to call you back. Before the days of universal inter-connections, telephone operators had to phyiscally connect your call to one of the scarce long distance lines the local phone company had to the next town, and so on down the line.
After a few of those connections, you could expect the quality of the phone call to degrade rapidly.
I remember in The Caine Mutiny (novel) Willie Keith has to pay $11.00 to call from Hawaii to the East Coast.
That was a lot of money in 1944!
I remember talking to my grandparents in Germany in the late 60s and early 70s. At that time, not only did we have to speak up, but there was also a several second delay that made conversations maddening. My guess is that old Hawaii 5-0 was pretty accurate.
You youngsters with your cell phones! 
Hawaii Five-0 was the “old timey days?” Pardon me but you probably have several hundred dopers lining up to smack you so hard upside the head your granpa will feel it. How old are you anyway?
At any rate the sound quality of long distance phone service was much poorer than it is today. Signals were sent over good old fashioned copper lines and had to be boosted along the way. Lots of noise was introduced and the signal degraded badly. Things have changed a lot since fiberoptic and digital signals have become commonplace.
As a side hijack thinking of the Spring “can hear a pin drop” ads made me think of my visit to the Mormon Tabernacle when I was a kid. The guide walked to the very front of the cavernous structure while we stayed in the back. We could clearly hear him drop a straight pin on the floor. While I may have my theological differences with the CoJCoLDS they really had their shit together when it came to accoustics.
What I should have added to my mention of the first transpacific telephone cable in 1964 is that even in the early 1970s there were a limited number of calls that could be handled by the telephone cable(s); when that was exceeded, the calls went instead by two-way radio.
All I remember about “old-timey” long distance was that it was way,way,way too expensive ! We had cousins living on the other side of the Atlantic from us . Once a year we could afford to phone them and talk 5 minutes !! Of course,now things are completely different ; I talk to my long-lost relatives so often on-line that I have to deliberately avoid them :0)
Yes long distance quality was awful because it was patched together from town to town. And overseas was reputedly worse. The several second delay someone mentioned is nonesense. They used geosynchronos satelites which introduce a 1/4 second delay (which does seem like a long time) since twice 22,000 miles is roughly what light takes a little under 1.4 sec to travel. If both sides of the conversation went by satellite (which I understand they tried to avoid, but maybe it happened sometimes, then the delay would be a half second, which probably seemed like several seconds. Now with all the cable strung around the world, I think they have stopped using satellites for telephony.
I have heard that early telephone calls between Australia and Britain were listened in on by the operator because the quality was so bad that the operator would use a stopwatch to calculate the amount of time for which billing would be fair.
Not too long ago, my father called us in the Philippines from Iran. The quality was really, really bad. The voice was faint and there was a lot of static. There appeared to be a delay in transmission, so that there was a short but noticeable pause before the other person would answer. Plus your voice would echo after about 0.5 sec. IIRC, this was less than 10 years ago.
Kids these days…
Satellites? You youngsters.
…through the snow, uphill both ways…
I will use my 6000th post to relate that even in the early 1980’s, talking to Alaska and Canada (which I did a lot) from the Midwestern US often had a 2-3 second delay in each verbal exchange, and you did have to raise your voice sometimes. It was almost so bad at times to go into half-duplex mode.