ABSTRACT
Availability of telephone service varies widely around the world. Sweden, the US, Switzerland, Denmark and Canada all have over sixty telephones per 100 population, for example, while Brazil, Columbia, Turkey, Iran and India have fewer than ten (AT&T 1982, 16). While it is obvious that access to and use of telephone service will be much more restricted in countries with fewer telephones, it should not be assumed that the mere presence of greater numbers of telephones per capita ensures its universal access. This assumption marks early predictions and later assessments about the telephone service in the US, which has been thought to have been quickly diffused throughout the country and universally available. Telephone service was soon available to anyone who wanted to use it to talk to anyone they desired, according to popular and academic writers (see Pool 1983, 86 for a sample of such comments). Pool (1983) states that early expectations about a low-cost universal service became a self-fulfilling prophecy (24). Boettinger (1977) extols the telephone’s democratic functions: ‘The privately owned American system arrived at the greatest public market and the widest use of the telephone, a reflection of a democratic mind…. Bell, Watson and Vail were indifferent to class or ideology. The telephone itself did not discriminate against race, creed or color. It served lords and “commoners” equally’ (98).
