40 Years After Carterphone Ended AT&T Equipment Monopoly

fm6 writes "Wednesday was the 40th anniversary of the Carterfone Decision which brought to an end AT&T's monopoly on telephone terminal equipment. Ars Technica has an opinionated but informative backgrounder on this landmark, which pretty much created the telecommunications world as we currently know it."

we're the phone company

[jacquesm]

We don't care. We don't have to...

Now if only they would get rid of all those dial up lines for internet access in rural areas.

It's really amazing that phone companies still don't have mandatory minimal access levels for net access outside major metropolitan areas.

It's getting better, but oh so slow. And in those areas where there is little or no competition 28.8 is still the standard.

Everyone should have an old touch tone phone

[LM741N]

As they work with the telco electricy in case the mains goes out. I've seen the huge batteries they use and I doubt they would discharge quickly. Cordless phones are obviously useless.

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Re:pretty much created ?

[Free the Cowards]

Yeah, life was so much better back when I was paying $1/minute to call another state. I hate it that I can call countries around the globe for less than 2% of that today.

"Political" Nonsense

[fm6]

Your history is a little off. First off, AT&T did step out of line, and repeatedly. RTFA.

Second, AT&T chose to break up. OK, technically, they were being litigated by the anti-trust cops, but they'd managed to drag it out for 8 years. At which time, the White House was inhabited by Ronald Reagan, not exactly a fiend for fighting big business.

But AT&T's management decided that a breakup, if done on their terms, would turn into a bonanza. The anti-trust people wanted them to get out of the hardware business. Instead, they got to keep their hardware business and spin off their local operating companies instead. This voided the 1956 consent decreee (imposed on them by another anti-business radical, Eisenhower) that limited their businesses to "common carrier" stuff. This allowed them to launch a number of initiatives based on all that technology they were now free to apply commercially. A prime example: UNIX.

Alas they never managed to make much money off of UNIX, or any of the other enterprises they started. Technology isn't worth much if you have no business sense.

One more quibble, this time with your definition of "politically motivated". The breakup was driven by justice department civil servants, and actually happened under a pro-business administration. If there was politics involved it was the make the breakup more like the one AT&T wanted.

We are enslaved.

[jd]

Want proof? The parent examples should be proof enough, but think about the following:

• Your DSL maximum speed is independent of hardware, it's a configuration setting at the teleco office. It's no use saying they charge more for more actal usage, since they throttle ADSL bandwidth if a user uses more than the average amount.
• The unauthorized switching of long-distance carriers is still a common practice.
• A number of States (such as Virginia) have such poor phone service that the message "all circuits are busy now" is commonplace.
• Cell-phone companies like Cricket tie themselves to a single handset, whereas other handsets (like the iPhone) are designed to be tied to a single network.
• Text messages and SMS can take hours, sometimes days, to cross the US. I can travel faster than a text message.
• Although technology has made hardware cheaper, you don't see that reflected anywhere.

AT&T/Bell Labs: the rest of the story

[tverbeek]

Some key implications of the Carterfone decision on Bell Labs were overlooked by this article. As it mentioned, the same consent degree that previously granted AT&T its network monopoly also prevented it from commercializing its other activities. It was largely because of this limitation that a certain operating system developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in those days was not exploited commercially, but was instead openly passed around academia like a joint at a pot party. Only some time after Carterfone, as AT&T started to shake off that consent decree and start commercializing the work of Bell Labs, did it start to exercise its copyrights to that OS, and by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn. In other words: *BSD, Linux, and OS X ironically owe their existence to the pre-Carterfone AT&T monopoly. They probably would not have come into being if that decision had been made earlier, because Unix would have been treated as something to be commercialized (or at least denied to the public) from the beginning.

No other choice for phone lines - who to blame?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

You have only one entity to blame for the lack of choice when it comes to phone services - the government. If AT&T had a monopoly, it was only kept alive by government restrictions on the creation of competing lines. No doubt such legislation was bought and paid for by the company, but only the government is capable of applying the force necessary to keep competition from existing. As long as government manipulation of the economy is possible, so are monopolies capable of being indefinitely sustained.

Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone

[EdIII]

You and the other poster COMPLETELY missed my point. No offense, but you both came into the middle of a conversation without reading the original posts.

I was talking with the other gentleman about a regular touch tone phone acting as a fail over communications device during a power outage in your neighborhood. The batteries that supply the power over the telco lines also allow older non-cordless touch tone telephones to operate since they were designed to operate from that power and not the power being used in your house. That voltage is typically 48 volts on the line.

I also pointed out to him that VOIP operating on cablemodems from your local cable provider are not designed to use the 48V being provided over the telco lines which is backed up by those large batteries.

So in the event of a power outage in the neighborhood your local cable provider may also have large battery systems providing UPS to their own equipment servicing your house. However, your VOIP equipped cablemodem is not designed to draw power through the coax line from those UPS batteries. You would require your own UPS to provide power to your cablemodem, router, switch, etc.

So YES you are BOTH CORRECT. Your UPS in your home will allow you to still talk on the phone assuming that your cordless phone, cablemodem, router, switch, etc. are all connected to the UPS. That would also assume that the cable provider has UPS backed up equipment in your neighborhoods.

However, that still had nothing to do with what I was talking about.

Actually no

[tkrotchko]

Telecommunications under the old AT&T was such a primitive set of technologies that it hadn't changed appreciably from a consumer viewpoint in 80 years.

Yes, it was reliable, yes, the service guy came out when he said he would, but we were paying $20/month plus we paid for each extension, plus we couldn't have our own phone, so we paid $1/month for a 2nd phone. For 20 years. This is in 1960 dollars. That's like paying $100 per month for a phone today.

Oh, and long distance was dollars per minutes, lousy quality. It was so expensive, that you played games with "person to person" long distance when you wanted to let people know you'd arrived. "I'll call and if I ask for 'Thelma', everything is fine, if I ask for 'Louise', it means the car broke down and you should accept the call".

Since the breakup, phone costs went down, the internet was allowed to get started because nobody could charge you $400/month for a modem line. All kinds of innovative devices are available, and now I have fiber to my house. The communications world is infinitely better off from the consumer's viewpoint than it was 20-30 years ago. I mean, it isn't even close. From all your comments, I have to assume that you worked for the old phone company? I can appreciate that it was a great place to work, but it came at a very high cost to society.

Re:It's a good thing...

[khallow]

Sorry, *no one* can convince me otherwise, ever.

Welp. All I can say, is if you can look at the diseased state of the old AT&T monopoly and think it's better than the amazing things that have happened due to that breakup with both the telecommunications industry and the internet, then you are stupid. As they say, you can't fix stupid.

Here's how I see it, my brother has been employed most of his adult life by Spectralink [evohst.org], a company that makes communication systems for workplaces at the building and campus-level. That job and that business only existed because AT&T's monopoly had been taken apart. My family uses cell phones talk to each other any time and any place civilized. The end of the AT&T monopoly (and the corresponding destruction of the state monopolies in Europe) paved the way for this technology to exist. I connect now to the internet through services that wouldn't have existed in an AT&T monopoly. That's the bald truth. AT&T held us back. It along with the rest of the telecommunication industry helps us now.

Maybe you were an employee. All I can say is that it's not fair to impose a monopoly on everyone else just so AT&T employees can be well paid.

"Carterfone", not Carterphone"

[1u3hr]

Headline is "40 Years After Carterphone Ended..."

TFA (corerctly" has "Wednesday was the 40th anniversary of the Carterfone Decision..."

Well done Timothy. All you had to do was cut and paste, but you had to try to type.

Re:It's a good thing...

[fm6]

Look at how quickly modems got faster and faster.

Never mind "faster". I'm sure Ma Bell would have given us faster modems eventually, though maybe not as quickly.

But how about "cheaper" and "practical"? My first modem was a 1200 bps thing. I used a dumb terminal, but of course it wasn't long before that was replaced by a computer. For a few hundred bucks, I had a small device that I could easily connect to any phone line and any computer or terminal.

What was the AT&T equivalent? Even though they had already been forced to allow third-party devices to be connected to their system (though you still had to use those silly acoustic couplers) they felt no need to supply their customers with simple modems. Their closest equivalent was a a "data terminal station" with modem, monitor, and keyboard all built into a desk. And the annual lease was several times what my modem cost to buy.

This cluelessness is the main reason we're better off without the "Bell System". They never understood the marketplace. When they were a common carrier they didn't have to, and that was a very bad thing for everybody. After they became a regular commercial company, they still didn't get it, and that was also a bad thing, but only for their stockholders.

Astonishingly, they never did figure things out. They ended up spinning off their businesses one by one, until there was nothing left but the long-distance operation. Finally, they were bought by one of their own spinoffs — mainly for their name. Good riddance.