In Mad Men they regularly have characters talking on phone from NY to California. Apart from one conference call there doesn’t ever seem to be an issue of call quality. Were the connections typically good in those days (mid-late 1960s)?
Very good. Vastly better than today’s cellphones. No echoes or delays unless you were going thru a satellite link. And unlike many of today’s connections, they were full duplex, which means that you could both speak and hear each other at once without one blanking out the other.
Sprint used to advertise “you can hear a pin drop” on their connections, although I think that might have been more 1970-ish when the competition was increasing.
The pin drop ad is from 1986, when competition was heating up after the breakup of the Bell System in 1982.
I’ve always thought that cell phones ruined good telephonic communication.
I still prefer landline to landline calls but I recall when I was a kid in the 1990s that long distance international calls to US or Australia from Ireland had a small split-second delay, enough that communication wasn’t as natural as a local call. That was why I asked the question.
Although I was around in the 60’s, I was too young to remember anything about the voice quality of phone calls. However, in the 70’s, before cell phones, I do remember land line call quality being very good and, as was alluded upthread, much, much better than today’s cell phone quality.
there could be a volume difference from a local call.
People in films always shout when calling overseas. That wasn’t really necessary was it?
It used to be necessary when calling across town.
There was more white noise in the background at times. Hissing, for example. International calls had a lot of the problems that cell calls have now–fading in and out, drop out, static.
By the early 1960s, Bell Long Lines was figuring out ways to squeeze more calls into the same bandwidth, using something called Time-Assignment Speech Interpolation, first on transoceanic cables and eventually on cross-country trunks. Here’s a 1962 Bell System Technical Journal article (PDF)
Noticing that, in human dialog, each person is actually speaking less than 40 percent of the time, the theory was that a computer examining 40 long-distance calls taking place simultaneously between two endpoints could detect enough pauses in those conversations to put two or three more calls in the unused spaces. This meant dividing all calls into channels to be reassembled, though of course the packets weren’t yet digital and couldn’t travel out of order. So there were occasional lapses where the first syllable after a pause wouldn’t be heard by the other party, and occasionally an entire word could be lost if no channel were available at that instant.
Fiber-optic connections between land lines copper-wired to local central offices would represent the zenith of voice communication quality in the 1980s, when Sprint’s advertising featured a pin dropping.
This actually happened on January 1, 1984, despite the fact it was mandated in 1982.
A date that will live in infamy. (Former Western Electric person.)
That wasn’t due to the phone connection; that’s just how one speaks English to a foreigner. 
Compared to modern land-line long-distance calls, long-distance calls then were noticeably poorer quality, in three respects:
(1) The spectral range was compressed, meaning you lost a lot of lows and highs, and the person would sound like they were at the bottom of a barrel lined with fur. Tinny, I guess, is the usual word.
(2) There would be plenty of background static. In fact, since the switching process was quite slow, you could easily tell when the long-distance trunk opened by the sudden jump in white noise background.
(3) Occasionally you’d get a simplex conversation, in which when one side was talking the other couldn’t, so no interrupting.
Another interesting feature was the occasional presence of echoes, either of your voice or the other, which could be heard by one side or both.
It also tended to be harshly expensive, so you wouldn’t do it often. If you had a long-distance relationship going, you wrote letters and called once a week or so, if you could restrict yourself to a 10-20 minute conversation. It was also the case that rates dropped after 5pm, and again after 11pm, so you planned out when you’d call to take advantage of this, and you might plan which party initiated the call depending on time zones.
Long distance tolls subsidized local calls all during the Bell monopoly, however, so local calls and service were quite cheap. It used to cost less than $10/month to have a phone and makes all the local calls you wanted and have Bell service your equipment and wiring. What was noticeable right after the breakup of Bell was the plummeting of long-distance costs while local remained the same, and then started to slowly drift up.
Now, for a really amusing train of thought, imagine how college students backpacking through Europe made calls home in the days before calling cards or cell phones. Answer: a large sack of coins and one hand steadily feeding them into the slot every 30s to 2min or so.
Well, you’re right.
(The only saving grace being that conventional land-line phones still exist, for the time being anyway.)
Agreed. I’m talking early '60s. Volume was different from a local call and static was variable too. Phoning long distance was always something special in our house. And we were on a party line. (Man, I’m getting olde). In those days, the telephone was something that was used , “on occasion”.
This is fascinating. And analog, amazingly.
Yeah and what was considered “local” and “long distance” was a big frustration.
For example we once lived in a small Missouri town of less than a hundred people in which “long distance” meant that even the next town over which was 10 miles away was considered LD and cost more while in a major city that covered hundreds of square miles and millions of people was called “local”.
It’s coming back, yes in the age where voice calls is just a extra feature of what a smartphone can do, along comes cellular HD: