40 Years After Carterphone Ended AT&T Equipment Monopoly 132
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It's really amazing that phone companies still don't have mandatory minimal access levels for net access outside major metropolitan areas.
For a solution to this problem google my sig.
Why? (Score:5, Funny)
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Why should they waste energy and money running lines out to where people aren't?
If you want to be out in the sticks, away from where people are (or you want something else that depends upon that fact), deal with the consequences of not being in a dense enough population to warrant higher-level service-- the same way people who want to be more closely connected live with the downsides of being in more urban areas. While I can get behind rolling basic services out to everyone (power, phone, dialup), once you
Re:we're the phone company (Score:5, Interesting)
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Then stop giving ISPs money to get broadband to John Boy.
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if they can do it in Korea, they can do it in the us and canada.
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Because Korea is as large as the US and Canada, right? And Korea has the same terrain as the US and Canada... and the same right-of-way issues, right?
Because the US can put a man on the moon, so should Uzbekistan. Because they have the same resources as the US, right?
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
If they get to selectively choose who they serve, let them negotiate land rights across all the private property, everywhere they go.
Re:we're the phone company (Score:5, Funny)
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I agree 1000 percent with you.
I am also a subscriber to a wireless broadband company, mostly catering to the Hotel / Hospitality market. They found out that they could make MORE money by providing wifi broadband (802.11 based) to outlying areas in So Calif.
50.00 a month gets me half megabit bidirectional (another 9.99 a month gets me another few hundredK, QOS'ed for Vonage or my VoIP of choice, an external and internal IP (one for VoIP, one NAT), etc.)). I can pay up to 150 a month to get much faster, but
Here's a toast to... (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone should have an old touch tone phone (Score:4, Insightful)
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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That's where I put all the UPS's that people give me that don't work anymore, after I go to rat shack and drop $20 on a new battery for them.
Most of the equipment in my house has a UPS. My phone, my answering machine, my stereo (keeps the channel presets), my WAP in the attic, etc. Gave one to my neighbor recently, her main phone is a cordless and wasn't working during a recent blackout.
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Rarely have I seen such a topical sig.
(Me, I use a cell phone; it has its own UPS!)
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Well, if you were psychic, you would know when it was coming and charge your battery ahead of time. Otherwise you are still eventually fucked.
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He could charge the battery now and keep it charged. Ingenious, eh ?-)
Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone (Score:4, Informative)
I still have a lineman's set in the garage. The cordless phone itself would be quite useless in such a situation. I agree.
However, cellphone only households are quickly on the rise. I have only used a cell phone since around 2000. Especially since AT&T came out with that unlimited charter plan years back.
Although I do technically have a phone line with my DSL service I never use it. In fact, the line runs straight from the street to my DSL modem. Just a patch cable in the junction box going straight from the telco box to the specific cat5 run servicing my DSL modem. I rewired the rest of the outlets for RJ45 instead and run Gigabit networking over those cat5 runs.
If I absolutely had too, I could connect the lineman's set directly to the cat5 coming in from the telco box and make a phone call. I could just as easily sit on my couch in the dark and use my cell phone. Those same huge batteries they use for the telco lines also are used on the cell phone towers.
So I would say yes, everybody should have an old touch tone phone if they do not already have a cell phone.
P.S - What about people getting their telephone service through VOIP with their cable company? Batteries won't help in that case and neither would a touch tone telephone. Only a cell phone would provide appropriate fail over.
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Why don't batteries work for VOIP from the cable company? I've got the cable modem, router, and wireless AP all on a UPS in my household. The phones all work when the power goes out and I stay online with my laptop like nothing happened.
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I was specifically referring to the large batteries that the telco uses on it's own hardware. Those batteries won't help you with your VOIP cablemodem.
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I have not once had a cable outage coincide with a power outage.
The ups connected to my cable modem and wireless router has never failed me. Except when the storm causes a surge on the cable line and blows up the modem. (happens to me about once a year, havent found a surge protector that will prevent it, but at least it doesn't blow up my router and computer anymore)
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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 us
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What you needed to do was provide a bit more information in your original post.
Your speaking of the phone not getting AC power. Big difference than the REN.
But, you do bring up a great point. An even better point would be this.
All (that I know of) telephone (land line based) systems still have to respond to pulse dialing. Screw touch tone, just pulse dial by tapping the on/off hook button X amount of times (x being the number dialed, ie, tap it 4 times to dial a 4, 9 times for a 9, etc).
10 taps means 0
Ho
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Actually I did. If they had read my post fully they would have seen that the batteries I was referring to in context were indeed the batteries being used by the telco to provide backup power the land lines.
Those batteries, and the entire land line phone system have nothing do with any of the equipment being used by the cable companies or any other internet provider, including the telephone companies themselves.
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Cable companies are now required to provide a QoS the same as land-line based telephones.
This tidbit of information was passed to me while waiting for power lines to be cleared, and wondering WTF a Comcast truck was doing there. The tech helping to guide traffic said that since they provide comcast telephone service, they, legally, have to provide the same type of uptime.
Could have been bullshit, but that was what I was told by Comcast trench person in Silicon Valley.
--Toll_Free
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Yes. That was bullshit. QoS and TCP/IP in general have absolutely nothing to do with land-line based telephones. That would be like saying roast beef sandwiches have something in common with key lime pies.
I am not sure I could have contained my laughter talking to that person. Well... probably.
On a recent airline flight I was having problems with my legs. Restless Leg Syndrome is real, no matter what the comics wan
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I wasn't talking QoS as an IP based 'thing'...
I mean a quality of service along the lines of "they have to be up and running as much as the phone company does, since they are now, in fact, a phone company".
I couldn't figure out how to word it correctly the first time, so I attempted to borrow a term.
I have RLS as well. Medical MJ works wonders, and if your state supports it, your drug test will be found clean by any member of the testing board in the US. Just passing along some info. Marinol (THC) also.
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Comcast VOIP modem (which all in one phone+Internet modem) comes with battery that will keep VOIP side running for several hours after power outage. If you have old phone which I do, I've used phone in a power outage.
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> Why don't batteries work for VOIP from the cable company?
Because cable companies, unlike phone companies, aren't required to have backup power to run THEMSELVES. Or, as Comcast's reps eloquently put it after Hurricane Wilma, "Our crews follow FPL's." No power == no cable == no cable internet. Hurricane Wilma left my old neighborhood's power lines relatively unscathed, but destroyed our power substation, so we had no power for more than two weeks (Coral Gables... central Dade County). I never lost DSL l
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Like I said on another comment, unless you are psychic, you won't know when its coming and via Murphy's Law, your battery will be close to dead and can't be charged.
Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone (Score:4, Informative)
I could just as easily sit on my couch in the dark and use my cell phone.
But the cell networks typically fall down and are completely useless during any type of large-scale emergency. Cell phones were completely useless to those ensnared in the Northeast Blackout of 2003 but I never had any problem getting through to people on my land line (until the batteries at the CO ran out anyway). Cell carriers design and maintain their infrastructure under the assumption that only a small percentage of consumers will be using the network at any given time and they don't bother to plan for contingencies. So when something happens that prompts a bunch of people to dial a number and hit Send at once, the whole thing falls down.
Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone (Score:5, Interesting)
I had heard that plenty of cell towers were still active during Katrina for 48+ hours afterwards. I dunno what percentage of cell towers have battery backed up UPS power supplies, but to my knowledge they are pretty common now. I've personally seen a couple of towers here locally, and they all had battery back up for at least 24 hours and one tower had a hook up to a generator.
Personally, if I ever had a large-scale emergency I would just run down to my data center. It has a very well equipped security force, unlimited diesel fuel contract providing emergency power, redundant internet, redundant air condition, and UPS redundant power circuits to every cage. I'm pretty sure that I would be able to communicate from there. If I couldn't do that, I would think that the emergency might be REALLY big.
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I use Vonage and a UPS to power my Vonage adapter, my WiFi adapter (I get WiFi based Inet), and my WiFi router in the house.
It will last nearly 12 hours... I "pulled the plug" in a blackout test one day... It pulled slightly more than 11 hours.
It, too, was one of those UPS's that was a 'gimme' from a friend.
--Toll_Free
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Where I live we get about 8 hrs before the phone lines die. Now the phone company sends a van out to sit there and recharge the batteries, extra important here as no cell coverage.
From AT&T to at&t (Colbert explains) (Score:5, Funny)
Colbert explains [youtube.com] how the old AT&T re-grouped/formed.
(Is it really that bad? All Baby Bells are back together?)
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> (Is it really that bad? All Baby Bells are back together?)
Verizon (nee, Bell Atlantic) is still not owned by AT&T (nee, Southwest Bell).
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well no not really.
2 RBOCs (Bell Atlantic, NYNEX), GTE, MCI, and various wireless assets make up Verizon.
4 RBOCs (Southwest Bell, Pacific Bell, Ameritech, and Bell South) what was left of AT&T, and various wireless assets make up AT&T.
1 RBOC (USWest) and Qwest (then mostly a wholesale fiber network), make up, well Qwest.
These days Qwest is kind of the odd man out and much smaller than most of the former pieces of AT&T. The (new) at&t and Verizon are about the same size.
We went form AT&T to at&t..big deal (Score:2)
It took 40 years for the change in case.
it took till just recently to get VOIP.
how carter won (Score:5, Informative)
Carterphone had a device where the handset sat in the cradle of their device, it worked in a similar manner to the later acoustically coupled modems, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler [wikipedia.org]
So there was no electrical connection (coupling) between the Carter device and the phone. The device had a cradle that the handset sat in, coupling the mic and the speaker. The AT&T lawyers said, well, your device is touching our handset. So Carter lifted the handset an inch out of the coupler, and said, is this too close? The AT&T lawyer said yes. So Carter carried his device across the room and said is this too close? The lawyer said no. Then Carter moved closer and closer, and AT&T's defense crumbled.
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Re:how carter won (Score:5, Informative)
Everybody seems to be confused about what this decision was. This was not the decision that broke up AT&T. This was the decision that allowed people to purchase telephones from companies other than AT&T. Note, not telephone service, juts plain telephones. Before this decision, you had to buy (or more likely, rent) all of your telephone equipment from the phone company.
As for the rest, what are you smoking? I can get a phone line for under $20/month, and that's 2008 money. Try doing that before the breakup. I can get plans for under $50/month that give me unlimited calling anywhere in the country. Try that before the breakup.
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The same was true in other countries as well. My grandparents in Japan still have a rotary dial telephone from The Old Days. It's wire goes directly from the unit into the wall socket, there's not modular jack on either end. It's also lime green, because it was their second phone(normal phones were black).
It has NO logos or writing, not even a "Made in..." mark, because there was no need to put any markings on it. It's the Phone Company's phone, the standard household model. There was no other phone to diff
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I wonder if the phone still technically belongs to the old NTT.
Wouldn't surprise me. I still hear stories of old people who are still paying $3/month (or whatever the cost is), month after month, year after year, decade after decade, to their local phone company to rent a telephone, just because it's what they've always done.
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Well what are you paying for? I can get unlimited local calling for under $25/month, which is well under your pre-breakup bills when adjusted for inflation. The only way you're paying that much money is if you're making lots of paid long distance calls (which contradicts your assertion that you don't need unlimited calling) or if you have a bunch of special features on your line, every single one of which would not have been available pre-breakup.
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If that's pre-break up money than that $15 is $30 to $70 (depending on if you mean pre-breakup as in 1984 or 1974) thanks to inflation alone.
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My phone bills before the breakup were almost always $15-$20 per month. Now they run at least three times that. I don't now and have never needed unlimited calling anywhere.
Yep.
This is not due to any fundamental change in the operation of the phone company pre or post breakup, or their cost of delivering services.
It was simply a shift as to how the billing was done.
In the old Bell System, long-distance rates were kept high in order to subsidize local phone service. Some schmuck paid $3/minute to call their
We are enslaved. (Score:1, Insightful)
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Yeah man, I know what you are talking about, AT&T just found out my cousin didn't have a phone plan and they had him locked up.
He says they have him making batteries (he only writes letters, they don't get phones).
Re:how carter won (Score:5, Interesting)
The Carterphone case was covered in my college telecommunications course. Dr. Baker made two points not mentioned in Slashdot. First, Tom Carter knew he did not have the resources to fight Ma Bell (AT&T for the nickname challenged). He asked the oil drilling industry for help, and received all he needed. The Carterphone was critical to the drilling business. Second, Dr. Baker stated that AT&T had a history of fighting the wrong lawsuits for the wrong reasons. Had they simply allowed acoustic coupling with no electronic attachment, the Carterphone would have satisfied customer needs, and the attached equipment monopoly would still exist. AT&T fought it, lost heavily, made unwelcome enemies, and left themselves open to the later lawsuit which destroyed their communications monopoly.
Phone cops (Score:5, Interesting)
But the YouTube link [youtube.com] I found on Google says "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation". So now we have Video Cops instead of Phone Cops.
We can't even talk about monopolies of the past due to monopolies of the present.
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The monopoly of the present that prevents you from seeing that video is the government. Do you think Google gives a shit about what Fox has to say when the government doesn't back it up?
The monopoly of the present that prevents your neighbor from murdering you is the government. Do you think your neighbor gives a shit about your rights when the government doesn't back it up?
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What a sucky headline (Score:2)
Clumsy wording, no punch. What was wrong with the one I submitted, "Happy Cartfone Day"? And why do editors have time to change headlines but not the time to make sure submissions actually make sense?
1968, eh? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.tvacres.com/comm_ernestine.htm [tvacres.com]
Now I'm only locked into Sprint (Score:2)
So I guess we haven't gone that far.
No other choice for phone lines - who to blame? (Score:2, Insightful)
The monopoly breakup history is very simple... (Score:5, Informative)
You of course already know how a monopoly is broken because it happens so frequently. Y'know, cuz like... it's always in the news that our government breaks monothic companies like Microsoft or Halliburton into pieces to foster competition, create free markets, and promote options for the consumer.
Regardless, here is a handy chart [wikinvest.com] to illustrate how Ma Bell was broken up in '84 and what has happened since. Stephen Colbert broke it down nicely here [forret.com], although that link has been removed [typepad.com] do to copyright claims by Viacom, one of our six global media conglomerates [adage.com].
Thank goodness you can still watch it in Canada [google.ca].
Of all the AT&T derivatives... we know Qwest didn't spy on us. So that's one.
W
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And it gets better (Score:2)
I'm so glad they're building out in my city, because Verizon, at&t and Sprint all pretty much suck because they still charge top dollar for net access on their networks.
Because that's all I want. With the net access I can do the things I need to do.
telecommunications world? (Score:1)
telecommunications of the USA don't you mean?
not everyone in the world has to suffer the USAs ridiculous telecom situation.
"Carterfone", not Carterphone" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
define "quickly" (Score:2)
FTFA: Within a few years of the FCC's Carterfone decision, America had become a motley world of funny receivers, slick switch boxes, and rickety answering machines. More importantly, consumers quickly embraced the "modulate/demodulate" device, otherwise known as the telephone modem.
Really? Because in the world that I've actually lived my life in, "consumers" (meaning the general public, and not just B2B niche markets) didn't even have computers in their homes, much less modems to connect them to the phone
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"Political" Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Your history is a little off.
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.
Actually, Lucent, their arm of hardware, made literally millions off Unix.
Every piece of back-end phone equipment I've used, that had a Lucent label on the front, ran a UNIX or UNIX flavored variant on the back end.
Case in point, the main phone switch in NY was designed by a friend of mine, whom worked for Lucent in Indiana. The problems later found in it where determined to be software, not the major hardware. UNIX was the O/S of choice.
Lots of hardware manufacturers that also own software houses use tha
Re:"Political" Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
As I recall, Lucent wasn't called Lucent until AT&T spun it off. And that business wasn't profitable until AT&T got rid of it. People who were competing with AT&T weren't interested in buying hardware from AT&T. At least, that was the reason they gave when they spun it off. Possibly Lucent just needed to get out from under AT&T's inept management.
Another detail: however much money has been made putting Unix into phone switches is a tiny fraction of what AT&T hoped to make when they were allowed to turn Unix into a commercial product. AT&T spent something like a billion dollars having a company I worked for build 68010-based Unix systems that were designed to compete directly against IBM-compatibles. Never sold a one. Actually, according to one of my sources, they never even tried: their strategy changed and they abandoned the product.
They must have made some money licensing Unix to companies like Sun and IBM. But not a fraction of what they hoped when they decided to give up being a common carrier.
Coincidentally, some 15 years later I briefly worked for Microport, which was a major vendor of UnixWare, the pathetic little descendent of AT&T's big plans for Unix (by then owned by SCO). What percentage of UnixWare buyers were telcos? 100%, or something like it.
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So they could experience huge growth under its OWN inept management?
Lucent wasn't exactly highly profitable AFTER it was spun off, either. I
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I stand corrected. Unfortunately, the "informative" mod points I got are non-transferable.
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The technical advances that Bell Labs made could never have been recreated with what was left.
Look at before and after the breakup. Look at how quickly modems got faster and faster. ANd once the telecom industry was deregulated in 1996, high-speed access bloomed, at least in more profitable markets.
The rest of the country needs high-speed access. This can be accomplished by either adding some controls and requiring some level of access or by creating a 'rural telecom company' that operates with subsidies from the federal government.
Maybe one day.
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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
AT&T/Bell Labs: the rest of the story (Score:5, Insightful)
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There absolutely would not have been a Free Software movement. The whole thing started when RMS discovered that the academic license under which MIT people were granted access to Unix placed all kinds of restrictions on what they could do with it.
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I wouldn't have minded the absence of a "free software" movement. But it's commercially-oriented prodigal child, Open Source, is proving to be quite useful.
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by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn.
Not sure what you mean by "out of the barn". Unix was still proprietary technology, and you couldn't put it in a commercial product without licensing it from AT&T. BSD, which originally contained a lot of AT&T code, didn't become a "free" product until 1992.
(Interesting timing. If that had happened a couple of years earlier, a certain Finish grad student probably wouldn't have bothered to write his own Unix-compatible kernel...)
AT&T could have just refused to sell any commercial licenses and had
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What on earth do you mean by "little-u unix"? BSD? Not FAIB. Academic Unix? Illegal to use except on the campus it was licensed to.
Yes, people made changes to Unix. My own employer in the early 80s took System V Unix, made many changes in it (in particular they merged in the virtual memory management from the Berkeley distribution) and sold it under their own name. But all this was done under license from AT&T.
No doubt a lot of people were playing with unlicensed copies of Unix. But they couldn't do any
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Try dropping the fixation on commercial use. You dismiss academic use as if it doesn't matter or it doesn't count(!), when that's precisely the point: it was out and about in academia in the 1970s. The commercialization of unix (which frankly wasn't important to its role in history until later, as evidenced by your 1980s example) came as a result of that proliferation.
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Fixation?
Bored now.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is true. But back in Ma Bell's day, if you wanted to get someone's goat, you called them a Communist. I was just kicking it old-school.
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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.
Actually no (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And of course no non-monopoly telephone provider would ever have invested in fiber optics or semiconductors.
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That said, Bell Labs basically no longer exists - as a direct cause of the demonopolization - and that's where the semiconductor was invented, and a large, large amount of groundbreaking fiber optics research was done.
And the current state of the American phone network is absolutely depressing. It is not an exa
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It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization.
Wow, really? I didn't know that in 1982 you could get ubiquitous cheap cell phones, residential internet connections with speeds of 5Mbit and up, unlimited calling plans to anywhere in the country for less than the cost of two good restaurant meals a month, and calls to other countries for prices so low they're practically free.
Maybe you're referring specifically to the circuit-switched POTS network. Yeah, that's probably in bad shape, along with the canal system, the buggy-whip makers, the steamship yards,
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It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization.
Wow, really? I didn't know that in 1982 you could get ubiquitous cheap cell phones,
Let me just stop you there for a moment, and remind you that the American cellular phone system is pretty much the laughing stock of the industrialized world. I am in Norway, a country with a population density which is one third of that of the United States, and the cellphone service here is immeasurably better than that of the United States, with its multiple incompatible standards, vendor-locked phone, geographically locked numbers for cell phones (Come on, WTF.), and having to pay to receive phone calls
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For the purposes of this conversation I really couldn't possibly care less about how the US compares to the rest of the world. We're talking about how things were before the AT&T breakup compared to how they are now. The fact that the US is lagging behind certain other parts of the world in some areas is utterly irrelevant to that.
I would love to hear your spiel about why circuit-switched POTS networks still have a point today, if that is in fact what you believe. Because I simply do not see it. Do they
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In fact it was the non-monopoly carriers who did.
Sprint and MCI deployed long distance fiber and digital microwave systems long before AT&T felt compelled to due to competition.
For most of the 80's AT&T relied on the old AT&T long-lines coax and analog microwave links.
If AT&T had kept its monopoly we'd probably wouldn't have seen much fiber until very recently and ISDN-BRI would be considered "high-speed".
I'm as straight as y = mx + c (Score:1, Funny)