Tag Archives: Western Electric

Remembering Our Microwave Past

Somebody sent me a link to an interesting article posted on 99% Invisible, a website associated with a podcast that looks at “the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world” The article covers a book called The Long Lines that documents the abandoned infrastructure of the national microwave network built by AT&T that predated the eventual long-haul fiber networks that now connects us.

The AT&T microwave network was built in the 1950s. The first long-haul microwave route put into service was between New York and Chicago, and went live on September 1, 1950. Over the next few years, microwave routes were established across the country.

The networks were enabled by the high-powered klystrons developed during World War II, plus new microwave technologies that allowed for the simultaneous transmission of multiple channels of data. A klyston is a vacuum tube that amplifies a signal from a low-power level to a higher one. The klystron system enabled the creation of microwave links with enough power to carry not only voice calls, but television signals. The technology was developed at Bell Labs, and the microwave radios were manufactured by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T.

The AT&T microwave network enabled the first nationwide broadcasts of television shows and news events. The first television event sent was a speech by President Harry Truman from the San Francisco Peace Conference in September 1951, which was then broadcast by the early television stations in major cities across the country. The first regular TV show that used the microwave network was Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now, broadcast in November 1951.

The AT&T microwave network led to some of the early success of television networks since it allowed for content that people had never seen before, like live Saturday football games from across the country. From the 1950s through the 1970s, practically all national programming was transmitted through the microwave network.

The microwave network wasn’t the only transmission network used by AT&T. The company had built coast-to-coast copper networks, and Alexander Bell made the first transcontinental phone call from New York City to San Francisco on January 25, 1915. This network was eventually enhanced with long-line coaxial networks, but those networks didn’t have the capacity to support television signals.

The microwave network consisted of towers built between thirty and forty miles apart, which accommodated the need for a line-of-sight connection. Interestingly, the core network electronics nodes of the network were built to supposedly withstand a nuclear explosion, since the microwave network also carried military traffic. These core locations included underground bunkers for electronics, staff, and backup power generators.

Anyone of a certain age remembers these towers, which either disappeared or were repurposed for cellular. Each tower had multiple giant horn antennas used to transmit and receive data. I remember in the 1970s that it was always easy to spot the AT&T building as you drove into a city because of the giant antennas on top, like the picture at the top of the blog of the antennas of the AT&T building in Minneapolis.

AT&T isn’t the only company that used a microwave network. MCI got its start as a competitor to AT&T by carrying telephone calls using its own microwave network that was often built along railroad rights-of-way. That network supported the early competition that eventually resulted in a competitive telecom industry.

The microwave towers were eventually replaced by the now-familiar fiber routes that were built starting in the late 1970s, and the greater capacity of fiber quickly made the microwave network obsolete.

Getting the Lead Out

There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about the possible contamination from copper telephone cables that have outer lead sheathing. I’m not linking to the article because it is behind a paywall, but this is not a new topic, and it’s been written about periodically for decades.

The authors looked at locations around the country where lead cables are still present around bus stops, schools, and parks. The article points out that there are still lead cables hanging on poles, crossing bridges, buried beneath rights-of-ways, and underwater.

Let’s start with a little history. Telephone cables with lead outer sheathing were produced and widely used starting in 1888. This was before we understood the dangers of lead in the environment, and lead was also widely used in paint, water pipes, and other materials used in daily life. Western Electric was the manufacturer of telephone cables for AT&T, and from what I can find, the company stopped making lead cables in the late 1940s. Lead cables were first replaced with cables using plastic sheaths and paper insulators. Starting around 1958, the industry transitioned to cables with polyethylene insulation.

I remember when I was first in the industry in the 1970s that there was already a movement to remove and replace lead cables any time there was a network upgrade to aerial cables. Many of the small telcos I worked with slowly replaced lead cables as part of routine upgrades and maintenance. But it’s a different story for the big telcos because starting in the mid-1980s, the big telcos made a decision to stop upgrading or even maintaining copper cables – what was in place stayed in place.

Even where the big telcos like AT&T and Frontier are building fiber today on poles, they keep the old copper wires. The lowest cost way to build fiber is to lash the fiber onto existing telephone cables. In most neighborhoods, the telcos add fiber and cut the copper cables dead. But those dead copper cables will easily be expected to now stay on poles for another fifty or more years.

I’ve never heard of any telephone company that has tried to retrieve buried telephone cables at the end of economic life. The cables are cut dead and abandoned underground. The idea of digging lead cables out of the ground sounds unrealistic since doing so will invariably disturb and break water, gas, electric, and telecom lines.

I’m also not surprised that the Wall Street Journal found lead cables crossing under bodies of water for the same reasons – the cables were likely cut dead and left in place. I can’t imagine the process of retrieving abandoned underwater cables – cables are laid with the help of gravity, but it’s hard picturing getting enough leverage to pull dead cables out of the water.

Telecompetitor wrote an article that quoted an estimate by New Street Research that says it might cost $60 billion to remove lead cables. I doubt that anybody has the facts needed to estimate this cost, but it points out that it would be extremely expensive to get lead cables out of the environment. I doubt that anybody even knows the location of most abandoned buried cables. It’s likely that the old hard-copy blueprints of copper networks are long forgotten or lost. It would be particularly expensive to remove lead cables that are now being used to support fiber networks – that would mean moving the fiber cables to a new messenger support wire.

The WSJ article seems to have been the catalyst for a drop in the stock value of the big telcos. The Telecompetitor article implied that the cable replacement cost is so high that it could kill the willingness of the big telcos to participate in BEAD grants.

When the WSJ article first hit, I assumed this would make a loud noise for a few weeks and would quickly fade away, as has happened every decade since the 1960s. But in this day of social media and sensationalism, there is already talk of having the EPA take up the issue. Even if that happens, there will be huge push-back from the telcos and it will likely take many years before the remaining lead wires are removed. The public should be comforted to know that the vast majority of copper cables on poles are not covered with lead – only cables built from the 1950s or earlier. The bigger concern is probably underground and underwater cables, and those have probably already been in place for at least seventy years.

ALU Sells to Nokia

sculptura phoneIt was just announced that Nokia will be buying Alcatel/Lucent. It seems that this was done so that Nokia can pick up the latest 4G technology from ALU. As one who has been in the industry for a while I have a long memory of the history of Lucent.

Before the Lucent name, the business was a part of AT&T and was the combination of Western Electric and Bell Labs. Bell Labs was always a wonderment for techies like me because they employed some of the smartest minds in the world. The lab was started by Alexander Graham Bell and over the years they developed such things as the transistor, the laser, information theory, and the UNIX and C++ programming languages. There were eight Nobel Prize winners from Bell Labs. I worked in the Bell System for a few years pre-divestiture and it was a point of pride to work for the same company that operated Bell Labs.

There was a time when Western Electric was the sole manufacturer of telephones and telecommunications devices. I recall that when I was a kid the only option for a home phone was the ponderously heavy, black Western Electric phone. These were hard wired and didn’t have long cords and when you talked you had to stand close to the phone. Over the years, Western Electric introduced smaller phones like the Princess phone and introduced longer cords that provided a little more freedom when using the phone. But all of the Western Electric phones were solid and they rarely had problems or broke. They were solid America technology made in America.

The first big change I remember for Western Electric was when AT&T started licensing other companies to make some handsets. I remember when the Mickey Mouse phone, the Sculptura phone (pictured here) and other colorful phones hit the market. Within a few years, the FCC began to widely license handsets made by numerous companies as long as they passed Bell Labs certification, and Western Electric lost their monopoly on handsets.

Western Electric also made the bulk of the electronics used by AT&T. These included voice switches, line repeaters, and various kinds of carriers used to carry more than one call at a time across a piece of copper. But Western Electric never had a total monopoly and companies like Nortel often sold equipment to non-AT&T telcos.

The big change for the companies came during the divestiture of AT&T in 1984. During the divestiture both Western Electric and Bell Labs were placed into the AT&T Technologies subsidiary. The companies went on, largely unchanged, until they were spun off from AT&T as Lucent, a standalone corporation, in 1996. Most of Lucent’s business was still with the various Bell companies, but they were branching out into numerous fields of telephony technology. At that time Lucent was the mostly widely held stock company in the US and had a stock price of $84 and a market capitalization of $258 billion.

Lucent fell onto hard times at the end of 2000 and was one of the first companies to be hurt by the telephony and dot com crash. The industry as a whole had heavily pursued the new competitive telephone companies (CLECs) that had been authorized by Congress and the FCC in 1996. Unfortunately, the large companies like Lucent and Nortel provided significant vendor financing to the fledgling CLEC industry, and when those companies started folding all of the large manufacturers were thrown into financial trouble.

Lucent never fully recovered from that crash (like many other tech companies that disappeared at that time). Their stock lost significant capitalization from the crash, but then really got slammed when it was revealed that the company had been using dubious accounting methods for recognizing sales and revenues. By May of 2001, the company’s stock had fallen to $9. I remember at the time that everybody in the industry could quote the Lucent stock price and we all watched in wonder as the company crashed and burned.

Over the next few years Lucent tried to gain some value by spinning off business units. It spun off its business systems into Avaya and its microelectronics unit unto Agere Systems. By 2003 the Lucent stock price was down to just over $2 per share and the company had shed over 130,000 employees. Lucent merged with Alcatel in 2006 and became Alcatel Lucent (ALU). That company did well for a while but then had a long string of losses until positive profits were recently announced.

And now the business has been absorbed by Nokia, mostly to pick up the division that makes 4G wireless equipment. There is not much of the old company left. Bell Labs is still around and one has to wonder if Nokia will continue to operate it. The Lucent history is not unusual for high tech companies. Western Electric had a near-monopoly for decades, but over time everything made by them changed drastically and newer companies ate away at the old giant. Today we have new giant companies like Apple and Samsung, and if history is any indicator they will someday be supplanted by somebody new as well.