How it started
Beginning
One of the first two telephone subscribers in Manitoba was Winnipeg businessman James Henry Ashdown in 1881.
Early 20th century
MTS is the descendant company of Manitoba Government Telephones, which went into operation in January 1908 after the government of Manitoba bought Bell Canada's Manitoba operations. The Crown corporation became Manitoba Telephone System in 1921, and eventually took over all private telephone operations in the province.
1940s
MTS announced in late 1947 that it would modernize its long-distance equipment in both Winnipeg and Brandon, using Siemens Brothers switching equipment, to better handle routing of automatic dialing of long-distance calls by telephone operators using the currently known Area Code system. To accomplish this, MTS needed to expand its Corydon Ave. long-distance switching centre by adding four additional storeys to the building. Initial communities to be set up with the new long-distance hardware included Boissevain, Deloraine, Dauphin, Kenton, Melita, Waskada, Lyleton, Tilston, Portage la Prairie, Pierson.
From Wikipedia’s article on Bell MTS, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2