Pacific Bell

Pacific Bell Telephone Company

Trading name	AT&T California
Type	Private (Subsidiary of AT&T Inc.)
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	1906
Headquarters	PacBell Building San Francisco, California, USA
Area served	California
Products	POTS, DSL, U-Verse (FTTN)
Parent	AT&T Co. (1906-1983) Pacific Telesis (1984-1997) SBC/AT&T Inc. (1997-present)
Subsidiaries	Nevada Bell

Pacific Bell Telephone Company, sometimes called Pacific Bell informally, is a provider of telephone service in California. The company is owned by AT&T Inc. through AT&T Teleholdings.

Historically, the company has had many names and service areas. The name "Pacific Bell" is no longer commonly used.

History

The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company was the Bell System's telephone operations in California. It grew by acquiring smaller telephone companies along the Pacific coast, such as Sunset Telephone & Telegraph in 1917. As it grew, it built and occupied San Francisco's Pacific Telephone Building on New Montgomery Street, described as a "monument to western progress and foresight". Purchases extended Pacific Telephone's territory into Oregon, Washington, and northern Idaho; on July 1, 1961, however, those operations were split off to become Pacific Northwest Bell. Entering into the 1980s, Pacific Telephone had assets valued at $14.5 billion, making it the biggest of any of the 21 Bells AT&T wholly owned, which also made Pacific Telephone the "crown jewel" of the operating companies. However, Pacific Telephone was one of the least profitable Bells, due to very tough local telephone regulations in California.

Prior to the AT&T breakup in 1984, AT&T held 89.8% of Pacific Telephone. After the breakup, The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company changed its name to Pacific Bell Telephone Company and was often referred to as PacBell.

Pacific Bell owned Nevada Bell, which is the reason that it was omitted from the Modification of Final Judgment, which broke up the Bell System.

Technology

Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, along with the rest of the Bell System, initially resisted automating its services, on the premise that their people could provide better service than machines. However the company soon realized its best manual systems were unable to keep up with the growing demand for telephone service. In the early 1920s, following the 1921 installation of the nation's first large panel switch in Omaha, the Bell operating companies began to install automated switching equipment.

Los Angeles and San Francisco had completely different approaches to adopting new automatic switching technology. The Los Angeles Telephone Co. merged with a northern California company, the Sunset Telephone Co. in 1883. Sunset in turn was purchased by Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. in 1906. Although owned by PT&T, the southern California company remained a separate operation, using the Sunset name.

The Los Angeles area also was served by a competitor, The Home Telephone Co., which began offering automatic (dial) service in 1902. While the Sunset Telephone Co. subscribers were able to make long distance calls via the Bell System's toll lines, Home Telephone Co. customers were limited to calling locally, and were able to call only Home customers. In addition, businesses were often faced with the need to have a line installed by each company. In 1916, under pressure from local politicians and subscribers, Sunset Telephone Co. agreed to acquire the operations of Home, calling the new entity The Southern California Telephone Co., and fully integrated operations of the two companies in 1918.

At the time of the 1916 merger, Home had 60,000 customers served from 16 dial offices. Sunset had 68,000 subscribers served from nine manual offices. Due to the size of Home's operations, and the public perception that Home provided better service than Sunset, rather than converting the dial offices to manual, as Bell companies usually did, due to the company's opposition to dial service, Southern California Telephone undertook an unprecedented step for a Bell System company. They began updating every manual switchboard position, adding a dial and trunks to the dial offices, so that the former Sunset customers could reach the former Home subscribers via their operator.

San Francisco continued to install manual offices throughout the 1920s. When PT&T took over the operations of its San Francisco and Oakland competitor, Home Telephone Co. in the early 1920s, their customers were switched from Home's dial service to Pacific Telephone manual exchanges. A 1927 Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. publication proudly describes the company's newest manual offices, without a word of plans to introduce dial service. San Francisco's first dial office, ORdway, opened on 23 March 1929. The first suburban step-by-step office opened in Palo Alto in 1929.

Dial service conversion was slowed by the Second World War. In preparation for Operator Distance Dialing, the San Francisco Bay Area standardized its numbers to the EXchange 1-2345 format in December 1947. In July 1948, Pacific Telephone converted the Peninsula cities. "Most Peninsula cities now have exchange names," according to the directory announcement, indicating that they previously used four of five digit numbers. The 1948 directory shows San Carlos, Belmont, Pescadero and Half Moon Bay with manual service. Examples include:

• DAvenport 2 - Palo Alto
• DIamond 3 - Burlingame, San Mateo
• DIamond 4 - Burlingame, San Mateo
• FIreside 5 - San Mateo
• EMerson 6 - Redwood City
• Emerson 8 - Redwood City
• JUno 8 - San Bruno, South San Francisco
• OXford 7 - Milbrae
• WHitecliff 8 - Los Altos
• ULmar 1 - Woodside

The same 1948 directory advises customers to dial "0" for the operator for calls to Sacramento, Stockton, Vallejo and several others. The operator could use operator distance dialing through the tandem switch to directly call numbers in those cities. For other call destinations, the instructions were to dial "211" for the long distance operator, who would establish a manual connection via another operator.

San Francisco converted the manual 25th Street office, serving the MIssion, ATwater, and VAlencia exchanges, in 1952. The final office to be converted from manual to dial was known from 1916 to 1947 as RAndolph, on Russia Street in the Excelsior. For its last few years in service, this office was designated as JUniper 6, following San Francisco's 1947 conversion to 2L-5N (seven figure) calling. On September 6, 1953, JUniper 6, the last manual office within the City and County, cut over its 2700 subscribers to brand-new crossbar equipment in the new Juniper central office on Onondaga Avenue. Riverside maintained a large manual office until 1956.

The Los Angeles urban manual exchange THornwall 6 in Burbank operated until the late 1950s. Berkeley converted AShberry 3, its last manual office, to dial in 1963. Crockett, he final Bay Area manual office, was converted to dial in 1969.

Pacific Telephone's last manual office was Avalon, on Catalina Island, dating from a radiotelephone service in the early 1920s. Pacific Telephone later laid two submarine cables to link the island to the mainland. Avalon was converted to dial in 1978, using switching equipment 23 miles away in the San Pedro central office.

Mergers

In 1997, Pacific Telesis Group was acquired by SBC Communications, and although the Pacific Telesis corporate name disappeared fairly quickly, SBC continued to operate the local telephone companies separately under their original names.

Pacific Bell logo, 1999-2001

In September 2001, SBC rebranded the telephone company "SBC Pacific Bell". In late 2002, the companies were rebranded again as simply "SBC". Meanwhile, employees of SBC working in California who support SBC's non-regulated services and/or services provided both within and outside California were transferred to other SBC subsidiaries, like "Pacific Telesis Shared Services" and "SBC Operations, Inc." However, for legal and regulatory purposes, employees supporting local regulated services were still employed by "Pacific Bell Telephone Company dba SBC California ("SBC California")" which is the SBC subsidiary that provides regulated local exchange carrier telephone services within the franchise territory in California.

On November 18, 2005, SBC completed its acquisition of AT&T Corp. to form AT&T Inc. Pacific Bell is now known as Pacific Bell Telephone Company, d/b/a AT&T California.

In 2006, the company's direct parent became AT&T Teleholdings, originally Ameritech, upon an internal reorganization at AT&T. Its former direct parent, Pacific Telesis Group, was legally merged into AT&T Teleholdings.

In 2007, local telephone service in California was further deregulated, resulting in price increases for AT&T California customers.^{[citation needed]}