TELEPHONE SYSTEM OF THE UNITED STATES 33 



One of the most difficult service problems of the Bell System is 

 that of providing service to farming districts where the distances 

 between successive farms as developed in the United States is often 

 great. At the present time service in such farming areas is usually 

 provided by multi-party lines with magneto signaling. These rural 

 lines carry from six to as many as fifteen parties and may be as much 

 as sixty-five kilometers in length. 



In the past the demand for service from rural districts of this nature 

 has generally been limited almost wholly to local service between the 

 rural customers and shorter haul toll service, and the present develop- 

 ment is a response to that point of view. 



The extent of development of rural service is illustrated by a census 

 made in the State of Iowa in 1920, showing that of 213,000 farmers 

 86 per cent have telephone service. This percentage is doubtless 

 materially higher at the present time. There were in 1928, in the 

 Bell System, 6,000 offices which served lines that might be classified 

 as rural. Of these rural lines about 12,000 were on a common battery 

 basis and about 43,000 on a magneto basis. These figures do not 

 include the rural lines which were served by connecting companies, 

 the addition of which would increase the above figures many times. 

 The development of this type of service has to a very considerable 

 extent been in the hands of local groups of small local companies 

 because of the nature of the service. 



With the present rapid development in the use of a nation-wide 

 toll service, there are a rapidly increasing number of stations where 

 rural customers will accept a higher grade of service designed for 

 general connection to telephones throughout the Bell System. The 

 development of improved rural service of this type is an important 

 feature of the present telephone program in the United States. 



Toll Service 



Service between telephones which are not in the same local exchange 

 area is called "Toll Service." With the exception of less than one 

 per cent of the telephones which are not connected to the Bell S^^stem, 

 toll service is offered in the United States between any two telephones 

 in the country and to a very large extent the toll plant is adequate 

 to provide good service between any two of these telephones. 



An outstanding feature of the last few years has been the rapid 

 growth of the toll service. This is indicated in the appended sta- 

 tistical summary which shows that during the last five years the com- 

 pleted toll messages have increased by 67 per cent. During this 

 same period the number of telephones in service have increased by 

 3 



