Telephone lines for rural subscriber service

The cost of supplying telephone service to rural subscribers is high in large part because of the high initial cost and the maintenance of outside plant required to serve the subscribers. For the immediate future the most promising methods of reducing these costs are by new and cheaper methods of line construction and by concentrating the load on fewer pairs rather than by other types of transmission such as radio. Some Bell system developments now under trial to reduce the cost of line construction and to increase the load capacity of existing lines are described. The problems of carrier transmission in rural plant are discussed with emphasis on over-all cost reductions which may be obtained by the use of the transistor and the compandor circuit.