Acoustic couplers

[Alex G. Bell]

Alex, interesting. Knew of Carterphones but not the whole story.

Question, how did Ham radio guys get away with patching  telephone calls all over the world by way of shortwave radio? Was it because a home built radio was not a point source so not worth the expense of shutting one down when a guy down the block could do the same thing if need be?

Or something else?

Probably just selective enforcement for a relatively limited non-commercial use.  If hams had been charging money for handling this kind of traffic there might have been some strong arm tactics.  And I'm pretty sure these calls would have been half-duplex, so not the kind of "natural" conversation as a connection provided through the PSTN and probably therefore seen as little threat for that reason too. 

Perhaps there was also some awareness on AT&T's part that hams also provide emergency communications during disasters and that prosecuting hams could have bad public relations side effects.

AT&T was always hyper-conscious of the value of PR in promoting and justifying the perpetuation of their monopoly despite ongoing litigation over many decades from those who wanted to compete with them or saw it as just "unAmerican" to have such a powerful monopoly having control over such a vital piece of the social and commercial infrastructure.  This is part of why they so prominently trumpeted their own responses to disaster situations resulting from natural events and their contributions to the War effort.

Even the 1975 NYC 2nd Ave. Central Office fire was turned into a big PR event as they attempted to demonstrate 6 years after the Carterfone Decision (and 9 years before the final 1984 divestiture) that their huge engineering, manufacturing and general economic resources gave them a unique ability to mobilize a response to a major system outage.