What Are Tie Lines | TalkingPointz 6/1/21, 2:51 AM

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What Are Tie Lines Delivered by Email.
April 01, 2019 by Colin Berkshire

Tie-Lines were a really, really big deal in the Your Email Address "
1960s through the 1980s. Every major
company had a large staff dedicated to
managing the corporate tie-lines.

A tie-line was a direct dedicated connection Look ma, no

between two corporate locations. If a company ads!
had a headquarters in Los Angeles and a
Admit it! You just
branch office in San-Francisco it would be tie- can’t look away. Yet,
lines that connected them together. There were there’s so much
two benefits to tie-lines: more.
Become a subscriber to
They were usually much cheaper than TalkingPointz for access to
paying long-distance. reports and premium
posts.
You could dial an extension number at the
destination end. There are several ways to
stay informed:

Without a tie line, somebody in the LA office Visit this site

wanting to reach a co-worker in the SF office regularly.
would need to dial long distance to the main
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What Are Tie Lines | TalkingPointz 6/1/21, 2:51 AM

number in SF. Then, a switchboard operator

Receive new posts in
would connect your call to the extension your email once a
number of the SF co-corker. It was slow and week.
expensive.
Become an Insider or
If the company had enough calls between LA All Access Subscriber
and SF they could justify paying the phone for alerts and access to
company for a dedicated line. The circuit would uncensored content.
be there, permanently wired, 24 hours a day. A
tie-line could originate calls on either end to
the other. So at SF the line would give dial tone
from the PBX in LA. And, at the LA end you Become a
Member from
would hear dial tone from the SF PBX. The cost $49 / month
for a line like this would typically be about
$1,000 a month.

Employees accessing
tie lines was an art TalkingHeadz
form, especially in a Podcast
large company. You
would need to look at The
a map of corporate
offices, find your
office (LA), and then
look for the access
TalkingHeadz podcasts are
code to the office you
@DaveMichels and
wanted to call (SF). It might be a code such as
@EvanKirstel chatting with
81. So you would dial 81, wait for SF dial tone,
interesting guests. These are
and then dial the extension number in SF. If
unsponsored and unscripted
your company had another branch office in San
for your enjoyment. You can
Jose (SJ) there would be tie-lines between SF
subscribe on most podcast apps
and SJ, but probably not between SJ and LA.

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What Are Tie Lines | TalkingPointz 6/1/21, 2:51 AM

Thus, a person in LA who wanted to call including iTunes.

somebody in SJ would dial 81 to get SF dial
tone, and then perhaps dial 72 to get SJ dial Listen on iTunes
tone, and then dial the extension number.

A large corporation would have dozens of main

offices and perhaps 100 or more branch offices. TalkingHeadz
The tie-line map would be very large and with Karen
complicated, and you needed to navigate this to Mangia of
call an associate.
Salesforce
A telecommunications staffer would be looking
May 25, 2021
at utilization and long distance bills and would
decide how many tie-lines were needed From the inside flap of
between which locations. And, as they were Working From Home We knew
expensive, they needed to be heavily utilized virtual workplaces were
and so they were often busy. It was not coming, but we didn’t think
uncommon to have this happen: Dial 88 to get they would come so soon. Yet,
to SF, dial 72 to get to SJ, dial 71 to get to Santa here we are, sitting in our home
Cruz and get a busy signal indicating that this offices, trying to make sense of
line was busy. our now-remote careers. Do…

Companies would spend hundreds of

thousands of dollars monthly on their tie-line
networks, and would often have a staff of a
dozen or more people designing the circuits,
and the phone companies would have a support
staff to help the company staff.

By the 1990s, tie-lines started to fade away

because long-distance rates dropped while
dedicated circuit pricing increased, and also
automated-attendants allowed extension
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What Are Tie Lines | TalkingPointz 6/1/21, 2:51 AM

numbers to be directly dialed at remote offices.

Was it good for you? Spread the

word: # $ %

By Colin
Berkshire

Colin Berkshire is a
highly technical HR
executive in the
Pulp and Paper
Industry. Colin has
an engineering and voice background, and is
currently on assignment in Asia. NOTE: Colin
does not respond to comments, and does not
Tweet.

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