Category: UK Telephony History

Introduction The first part of this post covered the early years of telephone numbers in the UK, from the first manual exchanges of the early 1900s through to the introduction of UAX in the late 1930s. In this second post, we will look at the introduction of Subscriber Trunk Dialling in 1958 and subsequent large-scale… Continue reading Telephone numbers in the UK – Part 2 (Subscriber Trunk Dialling onwards)

Introduction At the time of writing this blog post, the standard length for telephone numbers in the UK (be they mobile, landline or special numbers) is 11 digits in the standard national format (12 digits when shown in international format with the country code of 44 added and the leading 0 of the dialing code… Continue reading Telephone numbers in the UK – Part 1 (pre-STD)

Back in the late 19th century, when the telecommunications industry first started, the only service that was provided was the so called Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) that offered calls between two fixed telephones. And while there have been advancements in the way calls are made (the introduction of direct dialing for example), the designs… Continue reading UK telecommunications history – the devices

Looking back through the history of telecommunications in the UK, it is interesting to see not only the advancements to the technology and services available, but also the way that the providers of those services has changed. In this post, I am going to look at how the provision of telecommunications services has progressed from… Continue reading UK telecommunications history – the providers