r/telecom

On August 17, 1951, a telephone call crossed the United States in a new way. Rather than traveling coast to coast entirely through thousands of miles of wire and cable, the voices traveled through the air—relayed from tower to tower across the continent by microwave radio.

Pull out your cell phone. What do you use it for? Many of us have a cellular device that we carry with us every single day. It has become an important part of our lives. We use it for more than just making a phone call, they are miniature computers that we use to do email, browse social media, navigate across the city or across the continent, surf the web, take photos, create media content, and much more. In fact, many of you are likely reading this on your cell phone. And we take that for granted. Our cell phones are not anchored to any one location, we can move around freely with these devices. But many of us don’t realize how recently large-scale coast-to-coast wireless communications infrastructure became a practical part of everyday American telecommunications. August 17, 1951 was a landmark year that paved the way for the wireless device you hold in your hand today.
On August 17, 1951, the first transcontinental telephone call carried over the new coast-to-coast microwave radio-relay system was made. Seventy-five years later, remnants of the system that carried that historic call still stand across the American landscape. Concrete towers rise above eastern and midwestern cornfields. Steel structures stand silently over the surrounding landscape. Former relay stations sit beside rural roads, sometimes stripped of their antennas and sometimes still carrying the enormous horn reflectors that became one of the most recognizable symbols of American telecommunications during the twentieth century. Most people drive past them without giving them much thought. Yet these structures are remnants of what was once one of the most important communications networks in the world.
On August 17, 1951, that network entered a new era.

Long-distance communication was certainly nothing new in 1951.
Thirty-six years earlier, on January 25, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell in New York had spoken with his former assistant Thomas Watson in San Francisco during the ceremonial opening of transcontinental telephone service. That achievement depended upon thousands of miles of physical telephone lines stretching across the country. Over the following decades, the Bell System continued increasing the capacity of its long-distance network. Open-wire lines were joined by increasingly sophisticated carrier systems and coaxial cables capable of carrying large numbers of telephone conversations and television signals. But Bell Laboratories and AT&T were also developing another way to move communications across great distances: radio.
Microwave radio offered an intriguing possibility. Instead of carrying every signal through a physical conductor stretching hundreds or thousands of miles, highly directional radio signals could be transmitted between stations. But…there was one major limitation.
Microwave signals behave largely as line-of-sight communications. A station could not simply transmit a microwave signal from New York and expect another station in San Francisco to receive it. The solution was remarkably ambitious: build stations across the country and relay the signal from one to the next.

A Chain Across America: A Transcontinental Dream
The Bell System had already begun experimenting with microwave relay networks before the transcontinental system was completed. In 1947, a microwave radio-relay route connecting New York and Boston entered service. In the late 1940s, AT&T's Long Lines Department began construction of a microwave route extending across the continent. The project took approximately three years and cost around $40 million in 1951 dollars. The completed system stretched between New York and San Francisco through a chain of 107 microwave towers and relay stations, generally spaced approximately 30-40 miles apart. Each station communicated with the next station along the route. A microwave signal arriving from one direction was received, processed through the station's equipment, and retransmitted toward the next relay point. That station repeated the process, followed by another, and another, and another, and another. A telephone conversation could therefore cross the continent in a succession of radio hops.
The equipment that made much of this possible was the Bell System's TD-2 microwave radio-relay system, operating in the 4 GHz region. TD-2 became one of the fundamental technologies behind the developing Long Lines microwave network. It was an extraordinary marriage of radio engineering, electronics, civil engineering and geography.
Engineers had to consider terrain, curvature of the earth, path clearance, interference and the reliability of equipment at stations that might be located on remote mountaintops or isolated stretches of countryside. Some sites were relatively ordinary while others were anything but. Together these stations formed an invisible communications highway across the United States.

August 17, 1951
On August 17, 1951, the new transcontinental microwave system entered telephone service. For the first time, a telephone conversation could be carried across the United States by a transcontinental wireless microwave radio-relay network rather than depending upon a continuous coast-to-coast wire or cable path. Contemporary accounts identify Wayne Coy, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in New York, speaking with Harold Hull of the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco during the inaugural call. This was a technological milestone that would help transform American telecommunications.
But telephone conversations were only part of the story. Microwave possessed another tremendous advantage: bandwidth. The network could carry not only telephone traffic but television programming and data as well. That capability would become dramatically apparent only weeks after the inaugural telephone call.

Television Goes Coast to Coast
On September 4, 1951, the newly completed microwave network carried television coverage of President Harry S. Truman's address opening the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. Millions of Americans were able to watch the event across the country. The same chain of microwave relay stations built to carry telephone conversations had helped make truly transcontinental live television possible.
For a generation accustomed to instantly livestreaming video across the world from a device carried in a pocket, it can be difficult to appreciate how extraordinary this was. There were no communications satellites orbiting overhead, there was no fiber-optic backbone, rather, there was instead a physical chain of radio stations stretching across the landscape.
A television signal leaving San Francisco might travel approximately thirty miles to a microwave station. From there it would be transmitted another thirty miles. Then another. And another. Again and again, across mountains, plains, and cities, until the signal had crossed the continent. The towers themselves were the physical infrastructure that supported an invisible highway through the air.

The 1951 transcontinental route was not the end of the project, it was the beginning of something much larger. AT&T continued constructing microwave routes throughout the 1950s and following decades. By 1954, more than 400 microwave stations were operating around the country. By 1958, microwave carrier represented roughly 13 million miles of telephone circuits—approximately one-quarter of the nation's long-distance facilities according to contemporary Bell System figures. The network eventually became a sprawling web of microwave paths connecting cities, switching centers and other communications facilities across the United States.
Many early stations on the original transcontinental route used KS-5759 delay-lens antennas, rectangular antennas that looked very different from what many people now associate with AT&T Long Lines. Later stations increasingly carried the enormous KS-15676 horn-reflector antennas that became the iconic image of the Long Lines network.
Mounted high on towers and pointed precisely toward another station miles away, these horn antennas became commonplace across America. They carried telephone conversations, television, the news, and business. The network also carried important government and military communications and became part of the communications infrastructure supporting the United States during the Cold War.

But, as it is apt to do, technology eventually moved on. Pretty soon communications satellites offered another means of crossing great distances and fiber-optic cables provided enormous capacity. The breakup of the Bell System in 1984 transformed the organization that had built and operated the network. Gradually, many of the microwave routes became obsolete. Antennas were removed, equipment racks were emptied, and towers were dismantled. Yet the Long Lines network did not disappear completely.
Its remains are scattered across America. One particularly remarkable survivor stands near Lee, Illinois.
The Lee station was constructed as part of the original transcontinental microwave route. Land for the site was purchased in 1949, and its distinctive concrete tower was erected around 1950. TD-2 equipment and delay-lens antennas connected Lee with neighboring relay stations at Plato Center to the east and Sublette to the west. 75 years ago today, on August 17, 1951, Lee became one link in the chain carrying the new transcontinental microwave service. The site later expanded considerably as the Long Lines network grew, eventually becoming an important microwave and coaxial-cable junction. A steel lattice tower was constructed beside the original concrete structure, and the station continued serving the network for decades.
Another surviving original-route station stands at Sublette, Illinois, where the distinctive concrete "silo" remains. Sublette was likewise equipped with delay-lens antennas and TD-2 equipment when the transcontinental route entered service. Beyond these two locations, there are many of the original towers that relayed the first transcontinental wireless phone call that still stand today.
Sites such as these are more than abandoned or obsolete telecommunications facilities: they are artifacts of a communications revolution.

75 Years Later: Today
Today, August 17, 2026, we mark 75 years since that first transcontinental microwave telephone call.
Today, enormous quantities of digital information cross the country through fiber-optic cables in fractions of a second. Satellites orbit thousands of miles overhead. Smartphones connect wirelessly to cellular networks containing technologies Bell System engineers of 1951 could scarcely have imagined.
Yet those technologies belong to the same continuing human story: the conquest of distance and the connection of society.
The Bell System's engineers did not eliminate distance: they engineered their way around it.
They surveyed mountains and plains, they calculated radio paths, they built towers, they installed waveguides, antennas, transmitters, receivers, multiplexing equipment, batteries and generators. After all that, they connected those stations together until an invisible chain stretched from one side of the continent to the other.
On August 17, 1951, voices traveled through that chain.
Today that network has gone silent.
Many of the antennas are gone.
Some of the towers themselves have disappeared.
But here and there, along forgotten roads and on isolated hilltops, the old stations remain.
They stand as monuments to an era when connecting America required something extraordinary: a chain of towers criss-crossing a continent, each one reaching through the air toward the next.
Seventy-five years ago, that chain carried its first transcontinental telephone call.

**Photo is of the Lee, IL Long Lines site. Taken in October 2025.

Sat directly under a 5g mast, UK, phone is a samsung s23, network Tesco, 5g in my package, in the carpark where I work, get no signal in the building either, on top of a hill with no trees or other large structures around, can anyone in the know explain it to a dumb person? Can't even send photos on WhatsApp or load an email its that poor.

Cat6 CMR unshielded

Join us in this petition to force telecoms to answer their phones within ten minutes. I will be speaking at the CRTC hearings in November and would sure like big numbers on the petition and a number of customer service horror stories. Thanks!

EDIT: Wow, thank you for the overwhelming support and for pushing this to the #1 spot today! It is clear we are all completely exhausted by this garbage. Please make sure to grab the petition link and sign. Let's keep this moving!