Back in the late ‘60s, when Walt Disney World was a new concept that was being built,
the company knew that it had to tackle many of the logistical issues itself.
After all, the relatively small city of Orlando was not prepared to help build a vacation
destination the size of San Francisco.
So whether it was water lines, roads, or electricity, Disney would form their own companies to take
care of it.
That also applied to the many phones what would need to be installed and serviced at
Walt Disney World.
So, they set out to form their own telecommunications company.
It was a cutting-edge endeavor that held the title of a few firsts, including being the
first phone network in the entire state of Florida with the 9-1-1 emergency system.
When Walt Disney chose Central Florida for the location of his Disney World project,
a big motivating factor was just how cheap and uninhabited the land was down there.
It allowed for him to secretly amass twice as much land as the island of Manhattan, and
it would allow for the company to not only build whatever they wanted but to still have
enough of a buffer from the outside world to keep it at bay.
This was an amazing benefit that the company didn’t get to enjoy over in California.
The downside to the decision, however, was that the area south of Orlando wasn’t even
remotely developed enough to support a project on the scale of Disney World.
That meant that Disney had to take care of a lot of the utilities and more logistical
aspects of a small city on their own.
That included building out their own road network, water services, electrical grid,
and telephone system.
To do that last one, they needed a partner.
So in 1969, the Florida Telephone Corporation formed a subsidiary by the name of Florida
Telephone Satellite Inc.
At the same time, Walt Disney Productions formed their own subsidiary called Vista Communications
Inc.
Those two subsidiaries, in turn, partnered together and formed another company called
the Vista-Florida Telephone System.
Disney would hold 51% ownership in the company while Florida Telephone would own the other
49.
That joint venture would come with an initial investment of $10 million along with the intention
of installing and managing all of the telephones on Walt Disney World property.
While the resort wouldn’t open to the public until October of 1971, the Vista-Florida Telephone
System would begin operations earlier that year in July.
Two telephone exchanges were temporarily housed inside of two separate trailers.
In those early days, the system managed 800 phones, and combined, they were making an
estimated 10,000 calls per day.
By the time Disney World opened that fall, the number of phones had increased to 3,000.
Beyond just the impressive number of phones for one resort, the Vista-Florida Telephone
system was 100% electronic and based on touch-tone dialing at a time where much of the country
was still using rotary telephones.
It was also considered impressive when compared to the surrounding Orlando area, which at
that point hadn’t grown into the vacation destination it is today.
Many of the nearby neighborhoods outside of Disney were still using party lines, which
were shared telephone lines between homes in a community.
So one neighbor might pick up the phone to make a call only to hear their other neighbor
already using it and mid-conversation.
And by the way, if that sounds like a privacy nightmare, well, it was.
Party lines were most common in the early 20th century, but many rural areas continued
to use them, sometimes as far as into the 1980s.
But beyond the convenience of touch-tone dialing and dedicated phone lines, Disney’s phone
system was notable for being the first in the state of Florida to offer 9-1-1 as an
emergency phone number.
Prior to such systems, if someone had an emergency they either had to know the number to their
local police station, fire station, or hospital, or they had to call an operator who would
figure it out and connect them.
It required time in a situation where every second was precious, and it became a problem
for anyone who might have had an emergency in an unfamiliar city or town.
On top of that, more densely populated areas often had more than one station, each with
its own jurisdiction, which only further complicated things.
And as if that wasn’t enough the numbers they did call were often the main lines to
those stations.
So it was possible that people calling with an emergency would be met with a busy signal
due to another call that wasn’t an emergency.
This led to some areas, including ones in Florida, adopting an emergency phone system
in the mid-1960s.
For instance, Miami-Dade county implemented an emergency system in 1966 using the number
377-7777
In 1967 the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice
had recommended a single nationwide number for reporting emergencies.
So that same year, the Federal Communication Commission worked with AT&T to figure out
what that number should be.
It had to be short, easy to remember, and most importantly, a number that wasn’t being
used for anything else across the nation, including areas codes, service codes, or office
codes.
The number they landed on was 9-1-1.
After the number was picked, legislation was passed to reserve its use for emergency purposes.
However, that didn’t mean that the system was suddenly implemented everywhere.
Telecoms still had to turn to cities to pitch the concept, and it was up to those cities
as to whether or not they’d set up such a system.
On February 16th, 1968, the very first 911 call was placed in Haleyville, Alabama, and
that very next year both Tampa and Miami’s local governments began to discuss the pros
and the cons of setting up their own 911 system.
Now you might be thinking that there isn’t much of a discussion to be had.
Obviously, it’s a good idea.
But there were officials who opposed the 911 system because of course there were.
They argued that the convenience, by which I mean the crucial life or death time that
a unified global number saved, wasn’t worth the costs to build call centers and staff
them.
Luckily they were often the exception, and the idea of a 911 emergency system began to
gain traction.
In Florida specifically, in 1970, the city of St. Petersburg took its first steps towards
its own 911.
They established 895-1911 as an emergency phone number, with plans to fully build out
the system in 1972 before dropping the first four digits of the phone number.
However, debate, delays, and red tape piled up, and that 1972 goal would eventually get
pushed back to 1976, and then again to 1978.
So when Walt Disney World opened in October of 1971 with their own 911 system, they became
the first in the state.
It wouldn’t be until two years later, in 1973, that Gainesville would set up the second
911 system in Florida.
Not knowing that Disney World had already beat them to the punch, they’d proudly announce
themselves as the first in the state before eventually correcting themselves.
In a way, this milestone was a proof of concept for Walt Disney World and the Reedy Creek
Improvement District that it sat within.
A large part of why Disney sought their own local jurisdiction in the 1960s was that Walt
wanted to build a real city of the future.
The very first letter in EPCOT was Experimental, and the city would feature experimental building
techniques, city design, and even education.
To make all of those experimental ideas a reality, Disney argued that they needed to
be able to move quickly, and that’s what Reedy Creek allowed them to do.
So while cities like Miami and Tampa spent years figuring out if they should do it or
how they would do it, Disney just did it.
In all fairness, Disney was just naturally in a more advantageous position.
For as much as they eventually wanted to build a real city, they weren’t one.
They didn’t have to worry about who to tax.
There were no residents.
They just taxed themselves.
They didn’t have to go through a lengthy process to find the right telecom to hire,
they just made their own.
They had all of the powers of a city and few of the restrictions that came with governing
hundreds of thousands of residents.
Now, this could have been the end of the story.
Reedy Creek continued to operate their 911 emergency system and as of 2012, it was reported
that they handled over 24,000 calls annually, with around half of them being genuine emergencies.
But that wasn’t the end of their innovation.
Just a few years later, in 1975, the Vista-Florida Telephone System introduced the nation’s
first computer-controlled telephone operating center.
In just four years the original 3,000 phones on property had more than tripled to over
9,000 phones, and the computerized center allowed for faster long-distance service.
It also featured the ability to automatically charge those long-distance calls to the bills
of guests based on their room rather than doing it manually.
A few years after that, in 1978, they continued their push for innovation by becoming the
first telecommunication company in the world to commercially use fiber optic cable.
Disney stressed the efficiency of the system at the time, pointing out that just two fiber
optic cables were able to do the work of 600 traditional copper wires.
It was another advancement that was made easier by Disney being Disney and Reedy Creek being
Reedy Creek.
They didn’t have to deal with the red tape of digging up all the land in the system.
It was all theirs.
The following year, as a result of a change in ownership over on the Florida Telephone
side, Vista-Florida Telephone System was renamed to Vista-United Telecommunications.
As the ‘70s became the ‘80s, the telecommunications field changed drastically.
With the forced breakup of the Bell System of companies, competition grew.
Seeing an opportunity for growth, Vista-United began to offer its services outside of Disney
World.
Beyond servicing other Disney properties, such as Disneyland and Walt Disney Studios,
they also became the service providers for clients like Ohio University, Mayo Clinic,
Orlando International Airport, Sun Banks of Florida, and a number of other Floridian hotels.
By the mid-’80s, Vista-United maintained over 16,000 phones across all of its Disney
properties in Florida, California, and New York, and serviced over 11,000 phones elsewhere
across the country.
Even then, Disney World remained their test lab for new cutting-edge technology.
By October of 1985 Vista-United had changed every switch in their system to become the
first 100% digital telephone company in the world.
They introduced new features to their systems, such as the ability for callers to set up
their own conference calls, a “call back” feature, the ability to make direct long-distance
calls, and the ability to set phones into a “do not disturb” mode at night.
They also tested new management software at Disney World that they would later sell to
outside buyers.
The software allowed for telecom managers to know more about their system, including
how long callers were kept waiting and how efficiently they were transferred to the right
operators.
Eventually, United Telecom was acquired by Sprint and in 1999 both Sprint and Disney
decided to sell Vista-United.
The late ‘90s were a period of rapid consolidation for the telecom industry, with tens of billions
of dollars being spent on mergers and acquisitions.
This made the idea of selling the company more attractive and potentially lucrative
than ever before.
In fact, as the two were looking for buyers, Sprint themselves were in the process of being
acquired by MCI World-Com, which itself was the product of a merger just a year before
that.
In September of 2000, Smart City Networks purchased and merged with Vista-United Telecommunications,
forming Smart City Telecom.
While the exact price of the deal wasn’t made public, it was estimated that Disney
alone was making as much as $350 million from the sale.
As a part of the deal, Smart City would handle all of the switchboard and customer service
operations at Disney World and Disneyland, while Disney would retain 270 out of the 600
employees to operate and service internal calls within the resort.
Today Smart City Telecom continues to be the exclusive telecommunications company for Walt
Disney World.
Vista-United Telecommunications was more than just a telecom.
It stood as a real-world example of what Disney was trying to originally achieve with Walt
Disney World.
It not only served a crucial purpose behind the scenes that allowed for the resort to
operate smoothly day in and day out, but it was a utility that tried to lead with technological
progress.
It offered a taste of what could be when it came to the industry.
They sought to innovate.
It was an approach that helped cement them as a leader in tourism, and it was yet another
way in which Walt Disney World was a part of Florida’s history.