Controlling the Phone - Part 1: Demarcation

Right before Christmas I promised a series on how telephone companies use technology to control you, the subscriber, and their own business interests. I am pushing aside political and regulatory activities to some extent in this series so that I can concentrate on technology, knowing full well they are nevertheless inextricably tangled. I believe I can help to remove some of the emotionalism that seems to inevitably creep into this topic by focusing on technology.

To begin this series I will talk about the demarcation point. This is the invisible point (or line) that separates your sphere of control from theirs. For classical, wired residential service in Canada and the US the demarcation point is usually on the outside wall of the residence. The location for apartment and condo dwellers is typically indoors but outside the individual unit. (Wireless mobile service is quite different with respect to demarcation, so I will cover that in a separate article.) Within your sphere of influence you can do as you please provided you do not damage the telephone company's network. It wasn't always this way.

Historically there was no demarcation point. The telephone company's network extended right up the telephone appliance, including all inside wiring. If you go back 100 years this actually had technological justification. Telephony was new and standards were non-existent, so the only way to assure proper operation was a totally integrated network from a single source.

AT&T took the lead by becoming both an operator and a manufacturer while acquiring smaller outfits, including some in Canada. As a result, by the middle of the 20th century the standards for telephony equipment simply became the way that AT&T did things. Because of their dominant position other operators and manufacturers gradually adopted AT&T's specifications. This was less true on other continents, with the reasons being fodder for a future article in this series.

As time passed, we reached a point where dominant, near-monopolistic telephone companies used the technological argument of network protection long past the time that it had much technical justification. Regulators and entrepreneurs knew it and also understood how it was being used as a barrier to competition. The regulators, then as today, did not have the technical knowledge to effectively counter those arguments. Instead, it was the courts that ultimately changed the playing field through some landmark decisions in the US (further reading: Hush-a-Phone, Carterphone).

In my own lifetime I can remember when my parents had to provide a doctor's certificate to the telephone company to lease a long telephone cord so our one phone could be carried to a sick family member's bedside. Today this sounds laughable, almost inconceivable. They did this as a means to protect their revenue for extension phones - if you have a long cord there is less incentive to subscribe to extension phones. Of course they did charge a monthly fee for the long cord, but it was more affordable than a second phone.

That is the absurdity of the demarcation point in action. As a result of the referenced landmark decisions, the demarcation point was gradually pushed back. First it was the telephone sets themselves, to permit competitive telephone sets. This led to speaker-phone, wireless phone, computer modems and more. Next it was the inside wiring, permitting extension phones to go wherever the subscriber desired, or just to take the one phone from room to room by plugging into a phone jack (before this there were no jacks or they were prohibitively expensive). Homeowners could also do their own wiring or hire a contractor. Finally, the telephone company was pushed outside the house entirely. All of this was enabled with technical standards that were enforced by the regulator, under force of court order in many cases.

This is all behind us now, yet the telephone companies fought these standards every step of the way. Even when they knew they would have to yield they still sought to slant the regulations. Their intent was to reduce the functionality that competitors could offer in comparison to their own equipment, or to increase the expense of compliance. This was not a pretty process; the process was akin to a decades-long mud wrestling contest.

Look at the back/underside of every telephone, modem, computer or any device that plugs into a phone jack. You should find a CRTC/CSA or FCC compliance sticker that the device complies with relevant regulations that ensure the device will not harm the telephone company's network. Notice that the sticker does not indicate the quality of the equipment or even that it will work as intended, but only that the network won't be harmed by the equipment. The regulations protect the telephone company, not the consumer.

The next article in this series will be on residential telephone signalling systems.