http://www.texasescapes.com/DelbertTrew/Barbed-Wire-Telephones.htm

“In this day of seemingly unlimited telephone services, it’s hard to believe we once used barbed wire to carry our message. Laura V. Hamner, noted Panhandle historian, wrote of such telephone service in her book “Light and Hitch.” Various pioneers in early day Claude and Gruver told of nearby ranchers installing telephones using the top wire of barbed wire fences for the telephone line. — In 1949, when we purchased our Alenreed ranch, a telephone line ran eight miles to the south, some of it still using barbed wire.

At first, few realized the signal would be diminished during rainy weather because the wire was stapled directly to the post, causing grounding when wet.

As the theory of insulators became understood, the most clever, most innovative cowboys used every conceivable type of device as insulators to suspend the wire. I have found leather straps folded around wire and nailed to the posts, whiskey bottle necks installed over big nails, snuff bottles, corn cobs, pieces of inner-tube wrapped around the wire and short straps of tire holding telephone wires to the post.”

” Eavesdroppers seemed to be the biggest problem with all early day communications using a party line. No secret or business was safe or private. When you raised the receiver and cranked out your call, clicks could be heard up and down the line as all close to a phone listened in.

Any chore, no matter how important, could wait when the phone rang. Families fought for the listening position after a ring. We had a neighbor woman confined to a wheel chair who seemed able to stand when the telephone rang. When invitations to a party went out over the line, everyone who eavesdropped showed up.

Craig Morris, our early day ranch foreman, now deceased, and who cussed a lot, would crank out his call, wait until everyone on the party line picked up their receiver, then announce “All you old biddies better hang up cause I’m gonna talk about castrating a (expletive deleted) stud horse.” The hang-up clicks followed quickly – allowing a bit of privacy.”

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19970615/1416.html

“One such system operated in the isolated northeastern corner of Montana in the mid-1920s. Its developer was a farmer with “some electrical training,” who was called upon by neighbors to fashion a barbed-wire phone system. “There are miles and miles of pasture fences . . . and in many localities these corner each other at section junctions,” reported the farmer, who identified himself only as H.B.S. in the region’s farm journal.

The trickiest part of such installations was joining wires, whether between properties or across gaps in a farmer’s own fencing. Yet the system was supremely flexible. To bridge a gap between adjacent fences while allowing passage, one could employ several methods: bury insulated cable underground, or sink two tall poles into the earth and string them together with lead-covered insulated wire (the materials cost only $4), or even use barbed wire for the overhead crossing–as long as the splices were made with great care. (“Where the wires are looped, connect across a piece of wire and twist tightly on each side . . . and put more turns on than you think are necessary.”) Soldering, however, worked best.

Insulation was another challenge. Porcelain knobs worked well as insulators on fence posts to prevent the wires from short-circuiting in the rain. For the delicate business of bringing the wires into the home, farmers often threaded them through porcelain tubes. These were single-wire grounded systems–as H.B.S. noted, “the earth serving as the other circuit wire”–rather then the more expensive two-wire systems. To ensure that the circuit was properly connected with the earth, phone customers typically connected the end of the circuit to a six-foot galvanized pole that had been hammered into the ground. The farsighted H.B.S. even installed knife switches at regular intervals for circuit troubleshooting. These gave him the ability to shut down segments of the network to isolate faults on the line and thus locate them more quickly.”

Now I have never seen bobwire phone lines.

But I remember seening lines in KY, IN, and OH that where run of the top of fences and trees. And where there where neither they could just cut off a limb and stick in the ground with a glass insulator on a side branch.