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Welcome to Los Angeles Telephone!

This is the official web site of Los Angeles Telephone, an independant private telephone network based in Canoga Park, California.

	716 S. Olive St., Downtown Los Angeles Pacific Telephone building, built in 1911
	An original Southern California Telephone Company employee's badge

The first company to offer telephone service to the public in the Los Angeles area was The Los Angeles Telephone Company.

The Los Angeles Telephone Company began offering service in 1879, just one year after the very first telephone exchange in North America in New Haven, Connecticut, in January, 1878. The Los Angeles Telephone Company originally started with seven subscribers in the area of what is now Downtown Los Angeles.

In 1883, The Los Angeles Telephone Company merged with another local telephone company based in Northern California, Sunset Telephone Company. In 1906, the Sunset Telephone Company was acquired by Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, later known as Pacific Bell.

Meanwhile, another telephone comany, the Home Telephone and Telegraph Company, had also been operating in Los Angeles since 1902. By 1916, Home Telephone had 60,000 subscribers, but these telephones could not connect with telephones in the Sunset Telephone system. This created a very inconvenient situation for telephone users in Los Angeles, as businesses were forced to pay for two telephones, one from each service, and residents could not call some other residents because they were on the wrong system.

Finally, an agreement was reached in 1916 to combine the two systems as the Southern California Telephone Company, and consolidation was completed in May, 1918. Southern California Telephone officially became part of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in 1947.

(Some of the historical information thanks to Gary Goff.)

Keeping Los Angeles Telephone Alive

Located in the San Fernando Valley, about 25 miles west of the Los Angeles Telephone Company's original service area, Los Angeles Telephone is a proud part of The Global C*NET System.

C*NET is a group of vintage telephone and telephone system collectors from all over the world, who have connected their telephone systems together over the internet using VOIP (Voice Over IP) technology.

The present Los Angeles Telephone system is an Asterisk PBX located in Canoga Park, CA. Asterisk is a free, open-source PBX telephone system that runs in UNIX.

Besides private local voice service, Los Angeles Telephone offers several useful functions to the C*NET community, including:

• 1-383-5882 - UTC Time
• 1-383-5888 - Ask the Magic 8 Ball
• 1-853-1212 - Pacific Bell Time
• 1-936-1212 - Your Local Weather (dial your zip code at any time)

Test Numbers:

• 1-383-6001 - System Identification Message
• 1-383-6002 - Milliwatt
• 1-383-6003 - Echo Test
• 1-383-6007 - Your Caller ID Name
• 1-383-6008 - Your Caller ID Number
• 1-383-6009 - Numero de Caller ID en Español
• 1-383-6012 - DTMF Test
• 1-383-6665 - Screaming Monkeys

Click here for the complete Los Angeles Telephone Directory.

Technical Data

Currently, the Los Angeles Telephone switch is configured with Asterisk version 1.4.24 on an EMachines PC with a Pentium 4 3GHz CPU, running Cent-OS version 5.3. Users connect to the system using Grandstream HT-502 ATAs.

The CLLI Code for the Los Angeles Telephone switch is CNPKCADUVS1 (Canoga Park CA, DUnkirk Voip Switch 1) and its V and H coordinates are 9192,7947.

Customer Service

At Los Angeles Telephone, we're always here to help, or just to chat!

If you have a problem with or question about vintage Western Electric telephones and small telephone systems from the sixties and seventies, or questions about Asterisk, please feel free to contact us.

Calls from other vintage telephone collectors and those interested in VOIP and Asterisk are always welcome!

We can be reached on C*NET or directly by SIP URI:

• C*NET: 1-383-4820
• SIP: phoneman@sip.latel.net

We're usually around every day between 10am and 6pm Pacific time.