Reality: A picture of the Swedish telephone exchange, with some 5,500 incoming lines.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/the-stockholm-telephone-tower-1890/
Even if there was primitive multiplexing on those cables, I am fairly sure a 100 Mbps link could handle all of them these days with bandwidth to spare.
Edit: Telephony multiplexing didn't show up till 1910 but telegraphy multiplexing was around since the 1870s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexing