Looks like a terrific book by Robert MacDougall. It is reviewed here and that is how I got to know of the book too.
This book seems to have bit of everything:
In 1908, G.W.H. Kemper, a prominent resident of Muncie, Indiana, had two telephones. One telephone connected him to the local Bell affiliate, which in turn connected him to a huge network encompassing four million telephones east of the Rocky Mountains. The other telephone, leased from a so-called “Independent” company, connected him to only about 1,500 telephones in and around Muncie. Robert MacDougall wants to understand what this turn-of-the-century competition between the two systems meant for U.S. and Canadian history. Doing so allows MacDougall to explore a key insight knitting together business history and the history of technology — that “the most important fact about electrical communication” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not “the separation of communication and transportation, but the marriage of communication to capital” (p. 62).
This is an excellent book for several reasons. As the title suggests, it is foremost about the political economy of the telephone. As such, it is a model of how to write the history of a technology, particularly a technology as it matures and coalesces around competing visions and organizational structures. Robert MacDougall’s book weaves together corporate strategy, regulation (from municipal to federal levels of the state), the issue of local versus central control, and the scope and influence of consumers’ choices. The heart of MacDougall’s story is the battle between the Bell System and the Independents in the United States and Canada. This battle took place between the expiration of Alexander Graham Bell’s key telephony patents in the mid-1890s and about 1920 when the Bell System accepted state and federal regulation in the U.S. in exchange for a de facto monopoly of the nation’s telephone network.
Superb. Just a bit expensive currently on Amazon. Hopefully there will be an Indian edition soon..
Mostly Economics 
