Gee...  GTE Telcos

by Silent Switchman & Mr. Ed

In this issue we printed an article about 4TEL, a testing system used by GTE.  What quite a few people don't realize is that GTE hasn't been involved only with Sprint, a long-distance company.  For many years, GTE has been operating local phone companies in areas known as non-Bell regions.

Their equipment is made by a company called Automatic Electric, located in Illinois.  (We've heard reports that AT&T has bought them, to make things even more confusing.)  This company only made step, electronic, and digital switches, completely skipping over crossbar.  One of their early electronic switches was known as the EAX #1 and was introduced in the early seventies.  It had very few custom calling features.  An annoying trait of their Call Waiting feature was that it signaled you after each and every ring, making it very hard to ignore.

Eventually, the EAX #1 was scrapped and replaced by the EAX #2 in the mid seventies.  You could distinguish this switch by the loud 1100 cycle tone between rings that indicated a number wasn't in service.  Also, GTE's busy signals would time out after about 18 cycles.  Another characteristic: if you came in on someone else's Call Waiting, you could hear a short bit of the conversation you were interrupting right before the ring, which was about 50 percent longer than a normal ring.

The EAX #5 was introduced around 1980.  It was soon renamed the GTD-5 (General Telephone Digital #5).  It was more sophisticated, with no clicks at any point in the connection.

As we mentioned, Automatic Electric skipped the crossbar phase of evolution.  But GTE wanted to install a crossbar switch at one point.  So they contracted a French company to make a crossbar switch for a Texas location.  Instead, they received this horrible piece of junk that got numbers wrong, connected people together who didn't want to be connected together, among other things.  One day, the machine that played the non-working number announcement broke down.  GTE couldn't get parts for it.  So an enterprising switchman took a Code-A-Phone 700 answering machine, recorded a "number out of service" message, put the machine in play mode, hooked it through a push-to-talk handset, and held the button down with a piece of tape.  Everyone who called a non-working number in that exchange would get connected together after the recording cut off.  But one day the motor in the answering machine burned out; it was running 24 hours a day after all.  For a while anyone who called a non-working number in the 214-423 exchange would instantly get connected together.  Today, that exchange is served by a GTD-5.

The GTD-5 has different custom calling packages, known as Smart Call, Smarter Call, and Smartest Call.  The smartest package offers Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, Three-Way Calling, Speed Dialing (8 and 30 entries), Cancel Call Waiting, One Number Redial, Save Call (like a redial but with a special code), and Call Camping (calls you when person you're trying to reach isn't busy).  A person who has Call Waiting will hear Call Waiting beeps if a call comes in while the first call is on hold and they're talking to the second call.  Whether this is a design flaw or a feature is unclear.  All custom calling features can be accessed on the second line, unlike Bell companies, who only offer cancel Call Waiting on the second line.

Many of those who live in GTE land do not sing a happy tune, particularly those who don't have digital switches.  Here are some observations:

"The telephone 'service,' if I may use the term lightly, was abominable.  I personally experienced all of the horrors (lousy call completion rate, wildly wrong numbers, noisy-and-not-just-white-noise lines), and then some."

"I know a fair number of people for whom Pacific Telephone vs. GTE was a factor in choosing a place to live - and not the least important factor by far."

"For year after year here in Durham, North Carolina I put up with wild buzzes on the line; picking up the phone to dial, only to find other people on the line in the middle of a conversation; not getting important calls because my phone wouldn't ring properly; Touch-Tones that weren't buffered well enough and were converted to pulse anyway (if you dialed too fast, you had to start all over); dropped connections in the middle of a conversation; frequent wrong numbers not even remotely similar to my number.  These were not isolated things every couple of months - it was all the time."

GTE payphones don't get very good reviews either:

"I once spent a miserable two days looking for an apartment in the west/southwest Los Angeles area (almost all covered by GTE), driving around with a car full of newspapers and a pocketful of dimes.  It got so I wouldn't even bother stopping at a GTE payphone unless there were at least two of them together, as only then was it likely that I'd find a single working phone.  The defective phones were in nice areas and had no signs of exterior damage - they just didn't work.  Often they'd be sitting there emitting strange clicking and thunking noises, as if they couldn't quite digest that last coin.  Others would appear to be fine until you put a dime in."

Then there was this observation:

"One of the interesting operations that GTE participates in when you have not paid your phone bill is to not disconnect your line, but rather to block outgoing calls... except 800s.  When they did this to me, I didn't care because I almost never made any local calls.  One call to the Sprint 800 number and I could make all the long-distance calls I wanted."

Naturally, we'd like to hear of any experiences from our readers in GTE land.

This article was written with the help of Silent Switchman and Mr. Ed.  Angry comments were extracted from Telecom Digest, a newsletter distributed on the computer networks.