@eyo
Land lines are strung on power poles, Ma bell has never owned those sticks. If you're rural and don't live near an established line, you get to pay for the run, which, back in the day, was muy prohibitivo, so you'd take a pass, so you couldn't get a phone either.

More recently folks have abandoned them because they already have cell phones, and a landline is a chunk of change for nothing, as far as they are concerned (my Nephews, for instance, one urban and one rural). Also, most modern landlines go down in a power outage because most receivers today are hot-shot powered units, like those mobile units you talk on while walking around the house. So not such a grea emergency phone either.

Except for the impact of cell phones and the ubiquitous powered phones, a lot of this transpired well before the baby bells wee born. Comptche CA, for example, in the sixites, most folks lacked a phone, but the PO and the general store had phone booths, and the bar too, I think.

#2.1 I don't know how long you've lived and paid taxes in California, but in my view the Baby Bells never ever even attempted to produce what they promised. Remember Project Pronto? That was Pacific Bells promise to make broadband ubiquitous all across the state, until they sold back out to AT&T again wtf? How was that even legal?

Anyway, nothing like the promised broadband got built of course, in fact the opposite happened because cellular was more profitable, NOT technically superior. But PacBell took their tax breaks and built nothing in return before selling themselves back to AT&T. Sorry? Now, AT&T has let the copper lines rot while trying to exploit the "unregulated" sides of their conglomerate, like selling crappy inferior Alarm Systems to terrified seniors who don't know any better. I wish I didn't know people who worked both sides, neither are very kind or considerate of others.

Of course a few people are quite grateful to have something again, instead of the nothing that cellular technology claims to have replaced outside of the metro bubbles where experts agree everything is fine. The farmers I know on Pine Mountain have really crappy cell service, the landline was much much better as far as communication goes, went. In fact they strung themselves a "farmers line" down the canyon in to town not that long ago. It worked fine, but it was not "legal" because no one paid rent on it, it was just there working and maintained by the neighbors that put it there, and paid to connect at the pole until they couldn't.

Lesser evil trade-offs are no win in my book, not anymore. Time is too short to be slogging along trying to bend the arc of history toward justice, I am gonna yank it as hard as I can whatever time is left. I can sorta still appreciate how the majority of consumers want to feel good about having an app for everything, it is part of life now almost inescapable. What about those who prefer to function freely without a corporate all-seeing eye device? Let them burn? Well alrighty then. lol just kidding, you know what I mean. I hope.

Peace & Love