Those copper wires ran from your house to the local central office, the "last mile" of the connection. (which was sometimes 2-3 miles long) A quick read of the

Those copper wires ran from your house to the local central office, the "last mile" of the connection. (which was sometimes 2-3 miles long) A quick read of the linked article seems to indicate that it's BS, as it doesn't account for the real topology of the local loop. In particular, in older neighborhoods you had a bundle of pairs going down the street, and a new connection was made by patching in to a free pair, creating a "T" shaped circuit. When a house was disconnected, part of this "stub" might have been left attached; over time a single pair might accumulate multiple disconnected stubs. The capacity of that copper circuit is far lower than a straight run. In addition in many cases corrosion and water cause noise, further reducing bandwidth - I can remember having noise so bad on rainy days that I had to call and get them to fix it. (I assume they patched us onto a free pair and abandoned the noisy one) Of course none of this is related to the end-to-end bandwidth of the old telephone system. Starting in the 50s a longer-distance phone call would get a single-side-band channel on a microwave link, with about 3KHz allocated. Later on calls got sampled at 8KHz with 8-bit mu-law (logarithmic) encoding, or A-law in Europe, and transmitted digitally.