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Telephone Era in Alberta >> Companies
Once the telephone had established itself in the popular
imagination of western Canadians as a valuable communications tool,
the responsibility of linking everyone via telephone wire fell to
the many telephone companies that sprang up across the west after
1880.
In many western Canadian municipalities, the competition among
telephone service providers was fierce. Much of this competition
stemmed from the Bell Telephone Company of Canada as it tried to
establish itself in the west. In 1880, Bell was issued a charter by
the federal government to set up telephone systems from coast to
coast. Under the management of company Vice President Charles
Fleetford Sise, Bell Telephones came into the Northwest Territories
with the intention of being the dominant player when it came to the
telephony business.
When Bell reached the west, including the then district of
Alberta, it encountered municipalities that were much more anxious
to develop telephone technology than Bell had anticipated. Towns
like Edmonton, seen as too small to be worth establishing an
exchange by Bell, went ahead and developed exchanges of their own.
Over time, other local initiatives followed in places like
Lethbridge and Pincher Creek, with varying degrees of success. This
prompted Bell to become particularly aggressive in building phone
lines and telephone exchanges across Alberta, to compete with (and
often drive out) local phone services.
Far from discouraging the desire of western Canadians to remain
independently connected to the phone lines, Bell’s tactics seemed to
carry the opposite effect. After Alberta became a province in 1905,
the provincial government stepped into the fray, and in 1907,
established Alberta Government Telephones (AGT). AGT was quick to
set up telephone services in Alberta towns and cities at rates that
undercut Bell’s.
In 1908, the Alberta government bought out Bell’s share of the
telephone systems established up until then. Alberta Government
Telephones had become the dominant service provider in Alberta,
demonstrating the power of a public telephone system that was unique
to western provinces.
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Heritage Community Foundation and
Telephone Historical Centre All Rights Reserved
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