Telephones came about gradually, but say the kind of phone and system roughly like a modern pots line, served up by Bell, started around 1930.
Breakup of ma bell (roughly the same time you were allowed to own a phone) 1984
And even today I can't buy or connect an ONT of my own to the new fiber that Optimum installed a few weeks ago to replace my coax cable and cable modem that I did own (but did not fully control thanks to docsis), somehow.
