There were at least two or three open-wire AT&T long distance circuits between Boston, MA and Albany, NY during the early 1900's. Photographed is one of these lines, in Westminster, MA. At the time most ran along highly travelled east-west roads later known as well-known Route 2 and Route 20 in Massachusetts.

A hundred years later... large bundles of underground fiber-optic cable traverse from Boston to points west and south, some of this beneath the Massachusetts Turnpike and Amtrak rights-of-way.