That was most likely because the connection was going by satellite, more common for extremely long distances like over oceans than across town. Since radio waves are at the speed of light, and geo-sync sats are pretty darn far out there, a delay or echo is inevitable.
The delays and echoes we have on cellphones are for a different reason. Unlike analog, which travels just about as fast as light will allow, digital signals are usually stored and forwarded in pieces, not uninterrupted, real time. Add up a bunch of these small delays and they become big ones. And they still might go by satellite after all that, AFAIK.
When I lived in London in the 60s, I took an Australian girl into the Post Office so that she could call home. We went to a counter and filled in a form with names and numbers require, and paid over quite a lot of cash. They gave her a numbered ticket.
Then we waited (half an hour or more) until a voice on a speaker directed Number xx to box number 12 (or whatever). The phone inside was ringing and when she picked it up she had a pretty awkward conversation with her mother, caused by the long delay. I think she was allowed three minutes.
In the '50s, I was a radio news reporter, and we regularly recorded interviews over long distance phone, and they were not air quality, and were avoided when possible. However, the reason for that was not the phone line but the quality of the microphone in the mouthpiece of a standard telephone. If we had a voice clip that had been recorded on a studio mike, it could be re-transmitted by a telephone connection with very high fidelity to another station, and there was very little loss of fidelity in the audio.
In fact, sscheduled radio news broadcasts that were aired on affiliated radio stations came from the national network over standard long distance telephone lines, and they consistently had broadcast quality.
I remember my parents making coast to coast calls at Xmas and birthdays when I was young. They would call the operator, give her the number they wished to call, and wait for her to call back when the connection was available. Sometimes took 20-30 minutes. There was no direct dialing then.
Although I have little love for the pisspoor quality of today’s cellphones, I will admit that 1950s-60s long distance audio quality was a little hissier and noisier. It certainly didn’t sound like the other party was in the next room.
My mother told me that during her honeymoon in 1971, they made a long distance (not actually that far, maybe 50 miles) call from Sligo in the Irish Republic to Tyrone in Northern Ireland. She said it took several hours to get connected.
Can you guess where I’m calling from? The Las Vegas Hilton …
Home on Monday
The Little River Band was named after a river west of here. In the mid 70’s our international phone service (OTC) started using Echo Suppression (squelch). Before that there was echo.
I think satellite calls never had echo – they were always half-duplex by design. And the quality was better. But satellite calls had very long delays compared to cable calls. Once AUS got AUSSAT, voice calls were automatically switched to satellite if available, because of the better quality. At peak times you’d get a cable line instead, and if you specifically wanted a cable line (for FAX or data), you could use a different IDD prefix.
Telephone equipment in Aus in the 60s and 70’s was fairly backward compared to the USA. The equipment was a bit older, and the equipment design was much older.
The echo and the poor line quality would have been characteristic of all long-distance calls at one time, but I don’t know what the 60’s were like in the USA, if most people still had echo, low volume, narrow bandwidth and high noise on long distance calls, or if the quality had improved by then.
Standard local lines were broad-band and low-noise if you avoided the switching equipment.
Standard long distance lines were inherently bandwidth-limited, because they were using frequency-division-multiplexing.
So either your standard long distance lines were not standard, or your broadcast quality was different from what it was where I worked in radio.
In AUS, radio stations used dedicated lines which were high-bandwidth because they were hard-wired or hand-switched by staff in the phone company. Or multiple bonded standard lines with frequency shifting.
I knew an American who lived in England about the 1980s, and he said local calls within the same city got you this weird clunky sound, but long-distance international calls to faraway places were crystal clear.
[QUOTE=jtur88;17416456In fact, scheduled radio news broadcasts that were aired on affiliated radio stations came from the national network over standard long distance telephone lines, and they consistently had broadcast quality.[/QUOTE]
That certainly wasn’t true in Great Britain. Programs were distributed via special high-quality lines with much more bandwidth than standard phone lines.
Growing up in the '60s, I talked to my dad regularly on long-distance landlines. I never noticed anything out of the ordinary, though we were both always in big cities (Minneapolis, Chicago, Joliet, Parkersburg, Denver, Indianapolis) and not stuck out in the boonies.
I made some international calls from MPS/SP in the '80s to Europe (Great Britain, Germany). There was that slight delay due to satellite communications, but I don’t remember the sound quality being notably bad.
When I was a grad student in Moscow in 1989–90, you still had to go down to Central Telegraph to book an international call and pay for a certain allotted time in advance. When I returned here in 1992, I was able to direct dial any long-distance number from my apartment, but I don’t think it was possible in other places around Russia.
