[solid_fuel]

It did to an extent, they built the old copper network in tiers. I don't know the exact numbers and I'm sure they varied by area, but the general idea was - your home phone would connect to a local exchange, which served just dozens of local homes, and that exchange would connect to a bigger exchange somewhere higher up the network over a bundle of circuits. And that architecture repeated for a few layers.

But it wasn't 1:1, so you would have lets say 100 homes connected to a local exchange, and that local exchange would have say 20 lines to the next exchange in the network. That placed limits on the amount of concurrent connections you could have from one area - if 21 homes all tried to call people in the next city over, at least one of them would get a signal that all circuits are full and they would have to try again later. It drastically reduced the amount of lines you need between local exchanges though.

[cpach]

Interesting!

I guess it helped that phone calls were quite expensive, so people generally made very short calls. I haven’t really thought about this before but one of the main reasons for the pricing system could have been the facts that you mentioned.

In Sweden, the pricing system was tiered. Same area code (roughly: same municipality) = lowest rate. Neighbouring area codes = higher rate. Outside of that = highest rate. The rate was halved after 6pm. A reason for lowering the rates in the evening might have been that there were far less business users calling after 6pm.

One of the reasons I remember the pricing system is that my parents would not be happy if I dialed in to a modem pool before 6pm :)

Before I was born, the telephone company in Sweden (Televerket, later Telia) started to upgrade their system to use digital telephone exchanges (AXE). But there were of course still some kind of hard limit for how many concurrent calls they could handle, so I guess that’s why they kept the pricing system for a while.

This is partly speculation on my part, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

[solid_fuel]

Yep, that's right. The long distance trunks were a more limited resource so the telcos charged more per minute to use them. After digital exchanges came around it was less of a factor, but I think the pricing structure stuck around for a while.

[greenbit]

You'd think that at least initially, individual towns would stand up fully connected (albeit small) but isolated networks. That before very long, the idea of connecting one town to the next would occur, and it would be realized that you only need a relatively small number of "long distance" lines, connected between the existing switchboards. At which point, if you were wiring up a city, you'd follow that pattern; tiered layers, as you say. It stands to reason then, that Stockholm's system must have started very early, and had absolutely explosive growth, to get to a situation like that tower.

[solid_fuel]

They mostly did, but the limit on distance is pretty tight - according to Wikipedia [0] local loops were limited to 5 km in length (without extra equipment). I imagine that Stockholm's system here both started early and was in a very dense neighborhood of Stockholm, where direct wiring like this was still a tenable solution.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service