Western Union, who have a long history providing telegraph services have discontinued the telegram as of January 27th.
Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.
The Globe and Mail carried a story today about this that I can’t find on their site. They changed their name to “Western Union” when they connected the Western (US) lines with the Eastern lines.
It can be argued that the conjunction of the telegraph and the daily newspaper had a more dramatic effect on global information than any other technology, including the internet. With these two readers, for the first time, would know more about world news than about their neighbors.