The economic organisation of telephones in the thirty years or so up to the First World War reflected a set of tensions between local, regional and national interests that was to characterise most infrastructures in the 1920s and 1930s. The first concessions in each country were London in 1879, Rotterdam, Berlin and Vienna in 1881, Prague, Helsinki and Rome in 1882, and Stockholm, Ghent and Madrid in 1883. The radius of many networks was less than 5 miles, and capital cities accounted for a large share of telephone installations. Longer distance lines were slowly coming in, bringing the prospect of national networks subject to the kind of government pressures that had affected the telegraph and railways. In terms of institutions, there were local companies and municipal enterprises developing local, sometimes regional networks, while trunk lines were being developed by large nationwide companies like the Société Générale de Téléphone in France and the National Telephone Company in the UK or by agencies of the central government like the state boards in Scandinavia and the Reichspost in Germany.

National joined-up networks were feasible and desirable, as for the railways, but reinforced in the case of the telephone by the fact that, once a national network was established, the cost of increasing the number of connections was very low and there were spillover benefits to all existing subscribers. The main question was whether the initial set of institutions would facilitate the merger of local, regional and national networks.