It built and occupied San Francisco's Pacific Telephone Building[2] on New Montgomery Street which has been described as a "monument to western progress and foresight".

Theodore Halsey, a confidential political agent for the Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Company, paid attorney Abe Ruef a retainer of $1,250 a month for "advice" on municipal issues.

[4]: p31 After the massive earthquake of 1906, the Home Telephone Company contributed $75,000 to a relief fund for the city, but asked that it be held until their franchise was approved.

Los Angeles and San Francisco employed different approaches for adopting new automatic switching technology.

Following the purchase by PacTel, the southern California company remained a separate operation and used the Sunset name.

The Los Angeles area was also served by a competitor, The Home Telephone Co., which began offering automatic (dial) service in 1902.

In 1916, under pressure from local politicians and subscribers, Sunset Telephone Co. agreed to acquire the Home Company's operations.

[7] Instead, they took the highly unusual step of adding a dial and trunk lines to every manual switchboard position.

[9] The last manual office in southern California was in Avalon, on Catalina Island, dating from a radiotelephone service installed in the early 1920s.

[11] A 1927 Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. publication proudly describes the company's newest manual offices, without a word of plans to introduce dial service.

[9] Telephone service conversion from manual to dial systems was slowed by equipment shortages during World War II.

In preparation for Operator Toll Dialing, the precursor to customer DDD (Direct Distance Dialling), cities throughout the country converted telephone numbers to a standardized 2L-5N format, e.g. EXchange 1-2345.

Manual numbers were still used in some peninsula cities and were listed in the directory without the first two letters of the name capitalized, indicating a non-dialable point requiring operator assistance to reach.

[14] When Pacific Telephone converted its San Francisco operations to 2L-5N calling in 1947, the old central office names were kept in most cases, with an extra digit appended.

The manual 25th Street office in San Francisco, serving the MIssion, ATwater, and VAlencia exchanges, was converted to dial in 1952.

[9] Acquisitions over the years extended Pacific Telephone's territory into Oregon, Washington, and northern Idaho.