New long-distance phone lines;

              NEW LONG-DISTANCE
PHONE LINES
a Operators (I. to r.) Ellen Reigler, Henrietta Baiersdorfer, and
Winifred Carroll, head operator, have "voices with a smile"
from New York.
b Wiring panels impose order on seemingly chaotic tele­phone
lines.
The electronic relays start clattering in the equipment
room, where the "WATS lines" are wired into the tele­phone
system shared by the Executive and New York
Offices. They sound like the telegraph key breaking
silence in some lonely railroad station to report that
Train 219 left the Junction on schedule.
This new Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) was
installed in April, 1963 after a study had shown that it
might make the long-distance telephoning from the two
offices in New York more economical. Three of their
outgoing trunk lines are now WATS lines, permitting
reduced-rate calls to points throughout continental
United States except in New York State.
Last year's study showed that approximately four
times as many long-distance calls are made from these
offices during the busy season as at other times of the
year. A new study after the busy season just past will
determine whether savings have in fact resulted from
this first year's experience with the new system.
One WATS line is rented for a flat fee, 24 hours a day,
for unlimited calls of unlimited duration. The New York
Telephone Company, from which the lines are rented,
keeps no record of calls made on this line. It covers an
area from Maine to Wisconsin, south to Tennessee, and
east again to Georgia. The decrease in the telephone
company's record-keeping helps to keep the phone bill
down.
Use of the other two lines, which stretch from coast
to coast, is measured by meter much like a home owner's
use of water or electricity. Each of these measured lines
is rented at a base rate for 15 hours a month plus a
fixed charge for each additional hour. Since the service
was installed, these lines have been busy for much more
than the minimum 15 hours for which they are leased.
Calls on these two longer lines are charged only for
the time they are actually in use, metered by the second.
They are not subject to the three-minute minimum
charge of regular "station-to-station" calls (one quarter
of all calls on the WATS lines have lasted less than three
minutes). There is less need for high-rate "person-to-person"
calls, which accounted for almost all of the long­distance
telephoning of the Executive and New York
Offices before the WATS lines were installed. To be
sure, WATS-line time may be spent waiting for the per­son
called to get to the telephone.
Urgent long-distance calls are still placed on regular
lines if the WATS lines are busy. In the first month after
installation, the regular lines were still in use on an
average of about three hours a working day. Incoming
calls can be placed only on regular lines, not on the
WATS lines.
The Bell System expects the number of WATS lines
leased to customers throughout the country to triple
this year.
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