Protecting insde phones from outside phone lines

The question is whether or not AT&T local provedes surge/ambient-discharge protection, say at the transfer box, between its voice phone drop line and house dwellers inside telephones.

We recently suffered a near-one-month outage, caused by service-tech-detected, interior hard short which was, at long last, finally traced by local AT&T repairman to a inside, Trimline style telephone. I had never experienced such a failure (which was not a wiring/corrosion problem) over many decades, It was subsequently found that all two phones connected to the interior loop were similarly faulty. While currently replacing the still missing new phone, and endeavoring to recall the recently-purchased, Trimline's place of warranty return, it also occurred to me that the multiple fail phones might not be simply a random but rare occurrence but, rather, a much more likely result of a surge on AT&T's network line feeding out house. I also feel fortunate that this computer was earlier removed from the telephone network for wireless internet connection. 

So, repeating, does the AT&T dropline-to-house-net transfer box contain surge suppression (inside the locked out partition) or must inside phone owner provide and install a surge suppressor at each interior telephone plug in receptacle?