When: 1963
Where: USA
Why: Touch-tone phones changed the way customer service is delivered worldwide, and paved the way for technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol and the mobile phone
How: Bell Laboratories created a new way of connecting calls by combining two separate tones for each number
Who: Technicians at Bell Labs
Fact: Touch-tone reduced the minimum time it took to dial a 10-digit number from 11.3 seconds to less than a second
Touch-tone was introduced as a faster, more convenient way of placing calls, but its impact stretches way beyond this objective; indeed touch-tone technology has revolutionised the world of business and laid the foundations for today’s portable telephones.
Prior to touch-tone, a system called ‘pulse dialling’ was used to connect customers, built around rotary phones. When a number was dialled on a rotary phone, it would be represented as a series of ‘clicks’, made by the telephone rapidly interrupting a steady tone, and these clicks would tell the network which number had been dialled.
While extremely reliable, pulse dialling had some frustrating drawbacks. Rotary phones were often bulky and unwieldy, and dialling a number was slow and cumbersome, as the user had to wait for the dial to return to the top before entering a new number. Added to this, long-distance calls required an operator to assist the caller because telegraphic distortion meant that the ‘clicks’ became jumbled.
Taking note of this, the researchers at Bell Laboratories (the research and development arm of American telecoms company AT&T) began searching for a new standard that eliminated these issues and allowed connections to be performed much faster, as well as improving dialling. Around 1960, they began testing the first iterations of the Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) dialling system.
Rotary phones were often bulky and unwieldy, and dialling a number was slow and cumbersome, as the user had to wait for the dial to return to the top before entering a new number.
The system, which was based on a similar technology used by AT&T’s operators to connect customers’ long-distance calls, represented each number with a tone comprising a combination of two different frequencies. This meant that connections could be completed much faster, and enabled callers to connect long-distance calls themselves for the first time. It also meant that Bell Labs could finally complete another invention – the push-button telephone, which used separate numbers instead of a dial; Bell Labs had begun researching the push button phone in the 1950s, but had previously lacked the protocol to make it work.
Bell Labs and Western Electric first showcased the touch-tone phone at the World’s Fair in Seattle in 1962, and demonstrated it by getting visitors to dial a number on a rotary phone and then again on the new touch-tone keypad and seeing how many seconds they saved. In 1963 the first touch-tone telephone went on sale to the public in Carnegie and Greenberg, Pennsylvania. The Western Electric 1500 featured 10 keys and required a small extra charge to connect to the DTMF system; soon after, a 12-button model was released containing the star (*) and hash (#) keys to provide advanced functionality, and giving the keypad the form it has retained to this day.
The business world quickly warmed to the technology’s ease-of-use and increased speed, as well as the ability to store numbers and switch calls at the touch of a button. Meanwhile, home users discovered several advantages to touch-tone phones – including voicemail, which had never been possible with the old rotary phones.
By 1979, touch-tone had replaced rotary phones as the choice of most users around the world, and in the 1980s AT&T manufactured its last rotary dial phones. By the mid-1990s, they had become a novelty item, the choice of only a few traditionalists who refused to submit to the forces of change. Just two years after the US telephone industry was deregulated in 1984, every home in the country had a touch-tone phone.
Touch-tone technology facilitated the emergence of several new types of phone, notably the cordless phone. At first, it seemed the cordless handset would be nothing more than a fad – sales in the USA rocketed to $850m in 1983, then fell back to $325m in 1984. But the market gradually settled down, and demand began to climb. According to figures from ABI research, sales of cordless phones generated $5.2bn in 2009, a figure that will drop by 20% to $4.3bn in 2014. The research house concluded that the global cordless phone market will contract and be worth around $1bn by 2014, adding that the new digital, broadband-friendly cordless phones will staunch the slow and steady decline somewhat as mobiles and the rise of the smartphone nibble away at its market share.
Home users discovered several advantages to touch-tone phones – including voicemail, which had never been possible with the old rotary phones.
In addition, the development of the touch-tone keypad, with its space-saving combination keys, was a necessary stage towards the development of the mobile phone. Although mobile handsets did not gain a significant commercial foothold until the 1980s, the market has grown out of all proportion since – indeed experts predict that global sales will reach 1.7 billion units in 2011.
More recently, touch-tone technology has expedited the development of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology – a system for making phone calls over a broadband internet connection, which emerged around 2004. VoIP systems copied the touch-tone pad, and VoIP technology is backwards-compatible with all touch-tone devices. VoIP is extremely attractive to business because it offers cheap call rates and facilitates conference calls; furthermore, it underpins the technology harnessed by video conferencing services, such as Skype. According to figures from In-Stat, global expenditure on mobile VoIP will exceed $6bn in 2015 – evidence of the huge potential in this market.
Although VoIP is a fairly recent innovation, businesses around the world have been benefiting from touch-tone technology since it first emerged in the 1980s – thanks to the improved customer service experience it offers. Touch-tone’s frequency-based dialling system enables callers to communicate directly with a computer using the keypad, meaning that automatic menu selection during calls has become possible. This allows customers to dial in extensions or perform basic functions themselves without the assistance of a receptionist or attendant. Businesses have found that by replacing dedicated staff with these ‘automated attendants’ they can save huge sums through touch-tone-enabled customer service, whilst being able to deal with a higher volume of calls.
As computers have become more sophisticated, telephone banking services have become possible, where customers can perform actions such as checking their bank balance and transferring money without the assistance of a live person. Along with innovations such as Electronic Funds Transfer, this meant that 24/7 banking was finally a reality, greatly increasing the efficiency of business.
One might assume that, because touch-tone phones handle many of the call-forwarding functions previously assigned to receptionists and PAs, thousands of people in these lines of work would lose their jobs. But so far, it seems this hasn’t been the case; in fact, a report from America’s National Receptionists Association claimed that the number of receptionists employed across the country had increased from 851,000 in 1980 to 900,000 a decade later. The number of receptionists across the USA now exceeds one million; evidence that, for all the commercial impact of touch-tone technology, it hasn’t dented one of the world’s biggest job sectors.
Touch-tone is still the dominant technology used for placing calls, and it has directly enabled many other leaps forward in communications technology, perhaps most importantly the invention of the mobile phone. The rotary dial has been seen for years now as a symbol of antiquity, while the push-button keypad has become ubiquitous on communications devices.
Touch-tone will always be credited with streamlining the way we all communicate.
Yet its hegemony faces a sustained challenge from the explosive rise of the internet, which for many people has now replaced the phone as their primary method of communication. Email, instant messaging and social media seem to be partially responsible for the traditional landline’s steady decline in recent times, with usage falling in the USA by around 6% a year since 2000 and similar trends being seen across Europe. Indeed, technology has arisen that uses the increasingly redundant landline sockets, such as a lamp that takes advantage of the electricity running though the socket to power itself.
Mobile phones themselves may prove a threat to the DTMF system of connecting calls; smartphones’ increasing internet connectivity is rendering the once-essential protocol less so, as calls and messages can be connected over mobile web networks; Skype launched a dedicated Voice-over-IP smartphone in 2008 and many other models now include VoIP applications, in direct competition with the older protocol.
Whether new technologies will prove the death-knell for touch-tone systems remains to be seen, but we need only to look at the phasing out of rotary dial phones to know that even entrenched technology can quickly become obsolete. Nevertheless, touch-tone will always be credited with streamlining the way we all communicate.