Teltone Corporation

» see teltone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Teltone Corporation was incorporated in the state of Washington in July 1968, a sentence it printed verbatim in its own annual filings. Charles L. Anderson co-founded it. He had been a CPA, then controller at Tally Corporation through the mid-sixties, then the tenth employee at Physio Control, and he ran Teltone as president from 1970 to 1981 and sat as chairman from 1981 until the day it was sold. Its first registered trademark covers equipment first sold in November 1972: gear for adding tone dialing to rotary telephone systems, along with the tone test sets to check it with.

The thing it is worth remembering for is the telephone line simulator. If you are building anything that plugs into a phone line, a modem, a fax machine, a PBX, an alarm panel, a payphone, you have to test it against the network, and the network is a public utility you do not control and cannot break on purpose. A line simulator is a box that produces dial tone, ring voltage, busy signals and caller ID, and connects two or more handsets to each other, while being connected to nothing at all. Teltone built the TLS series for years and added an ISDN version, the ILS-1000, in the year to June 1996.

It had two other businesses. One was line sharing, letting several devices share a single phone line, and its Substation Line Sharing Switch went into electrical substations from around 1993 onward: by 2008 the technology underneath it was reported to be installed in about 85 percent of North American electrical substations, which is a remarkable market position for a company most people have never heard of. The other was a chip business making DTMF receivers and call progress detectors, sold to C.P. Clare on 7 September 2000 for roughly $1,975,000. It also made a patented 9-1-1 call routing system that could reroute emergency calls over the public network when the dedicated lines were cut.

~ the dossier ~

~ going private ~

Teltone was publicly traded, though not where its own Wikipedia entry says: it was on the over-the-counter bulletin board as TTNC, not Nasdaq. Its filings make the shape of the business very clear. Revenue ran about $9.5 million in the year to June 1996 and peaked at $12,026,893 in the year to June 2000, with 76 full-time employees. Then the chip division went, the telecom market collapsed, and the year to June 2002 brought $7.7 million of sales, 46 employees and a net loss of $1,242,865 against $43,362 of cash in the bank.

So it stopped being a public company, and the arithmetic for that decision is the most human thing in the file. The board calculated that deregistering would save about $90,000 a year: $25,500 to the transfer agent, $16,000 to the auditors, $15,000 to SEC counsel, $15,000 for directors' insurance, $4,500 for printing and mailing. A reverse split of one share for every nine hundred took effect on 3 January 2003, cashing out anyone below the threshold, and the Form 15 went in on 16 January. The board declined to commission a fairness opinion on the grounds that three of its five members had served for over twenty years.

~ the bench and the substation ~

Two of the directors had been there since 1976 and are worth naming, because they are not who you expect to find on the board of a small telephone test equipment maker in Bothell. Charles P. Waite was a retired general partner of Greylock. Paul M. Wythes had been a founding partner of Sutter Hill Ventures since 1964. Partners from two long-established American venture firms sat on this board for over thirty years while the company made boxes that produce fake dial tone.

By 2008 it was down to roughly two dozen people. On 24 June that year Industrial Defender, a Massachusetts industrial cybersecurity company, announced it had bought Teltone. The local paper in Everett reported the terms plainly: the offices and the staff would stay in Bothell, and they would work under the Industrial Defender name. The buyer wanted Gauntlet, the substation communications product, which fitted its business of defending utility infrastructure. The name went with the deal.

~ the legacy page ~

What happened to the name afterward is a chain of acquisitions that reads like a joke about the defense industry. Industrial Defender went to Lockheed Martin in 2014. It passed into Leidos with the Lockheed services merger of 2016, and on to Capgemini in 2019. Along the way somebody kept a page up at teltone.com for legacy customers. The last version of it, archived in 2018, says that Teltone Corporation was acquired by Leidos in 2016 and that they were committed to supporting customers of legacy Teltone products. Under it is a list. One product is marked available. Ten are marked legacy, the TLS line simulators among them.

The site died quietly between 19 and 27 December 2019, when the product pages started returning 404, and the whole domain was a not-found page by 11 January 2020. teltone.com does not resolve today, though it is still registered and still has nameservers delegated to it. The federal trademark on the word Teltone had already lapsed on 18 February 2006, while the company was still trading under it.

~ testing against a thing that is not there ~

I came to this one through the product. Simulating the environment, instead of borrowing the real one, is the normal condition of my working life. The computer vision work I do now gets tested against recorded flights and synthetic scenes long before anything is allowed near an actual aircraft, for the same two reasons Teltone's customers had: the real thing is expensive to get access to, and you need to be able to produce the failure cases deliberately. You cannot ask the phone company to give you a busy signal with specific timing four hundred times in a row. You can ask a box on your desk.

Teltone sold that box to people building modems while I was still in primary school in Turkey, and the modems I eventually used at home came through that kind of testing without anybody telling me. That is the ordinary condition of test equipment. It is in the room for every product you ever bought, and it is never in the room when you open the box.

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