Independent telephone company

Mom-and-pop companies were largely manually operated until the wide adoption of the Class 5 telephone switch providing local automatic service.

The voice of the smaller independents were the two magazines, Telephony and Telephone Engineer and Management (TE&M), both from Chicago.

Bryant Pond in Woodstock, Maine was known as having the last manual magneto (hand-crank) telephone exchange in America.

The family-owned Bryant Pond Telephone Company was operated from a two-position magneto switchboard in the living room of owners Barbara and Elden Hathaway.

More restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and the introduction of competition and mergers between competitors and some provincial carriers, resulted in the disappearance of Telecom Canada; "independent" is no longer distinguished as a formal alliance, but now as a comparison of size and share of ILEC lines.

This 1911 advertisement from Seattle shows phone numbers from two different phone companies; the exchanges were not interconnected.