oh yeah.

[unixronin]

cymrullewes got this fortune this morning:

There were in this country two very large monopolies.  The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard.  The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape^[1], magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite.  Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?

[1]  Actually, I thought Grundig invented magnetic tape.  But still....

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Actually, long distance did eventually go down in price, and with the advent of the cellphone has essentially become flat-rate. We're also seeing Open Standards take hold in the cellphone industry (GSM, etc.), something that wouldn't have happened had Ma Bell been allowed to remain... and with the Open Standards and open markets, we're also seeing Open Source sneak its way into the arena, what with Sony-san beginning to market Linux-based phones....

This is essentially the same argument as the Cuckoo Clock argument in the Third Man... and just as made of straw. Sure, FedGov is rotten to the core and has been for three generations now.... but that doesn't make the breakup of AT&T a bad thing. Every once in a while DOJ gets it right.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Um, speaking of straw, I wasn't arguing anything about the breakup. I just found the fortune amusing with the institutionalized-incompetence agency getting to tell the technological innovator how to run its business.

Besides, you're wrong about some of that anyway. I've been told by folks on the inside of the industry that the real reason the FedGov broke up AT&T was because Ma Bell was about to effectively eliminate long distance charges, and the other long distance carriers screamed bloody murder because they would have gone out of business.
Yes, long distance charges went down, and have become effectively flat-rate with cell phones (though often bloody expensive flat rate, and the bastards catch you both coming and going by charging you for calls you receive as well as ones you make, whether you wanted to get the call or not). But if the government hadn't broken up Ma Bell when it did, them according to some of the folks I've talked to, we'd all have had free long-distance years ago. And maybe cell technology might not be where it is now -- but then again, who's to say it wouldn't be? -- but the one thing you can say for sure is, you'd be able to buy cell service in any city in the US, go to any other city in the US, and KNOW IT WOULD WORK. That's something our current patchwork quilt of cellular carriers have yet to deliver, regardless of all their cross-service agreements.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and Gods help you if you ever run afoul of them. Unlike when Sprint gave me customer-no-service some years ago, I gave'em the Trump™.... (You know, "You're Fired!") (Although I prefer to call it a George Jetson.... :) Furthermore, there's no race for build-out, so places like Maynardville, TN could basically kiss service goodbye at the Knox county line...

No, I like it the way it is, thanks. It ain't perfik, but I think it's better than it would be under monpoly.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nobody's saying either way was perfect. I think you're making way too much out of this, counter-arguing points that haven't been raised.

Anyway, do you really think it's any better now? Hey, we'd just LOVE to tell Sprint to shove it. There's just one problem: We can switch to any third-party local phone carrier we like, and it's not going to do us a damned bit of good, because Sprint owns the physical plant. At least as long as we're a Sprint customer, they have some direct responsibility to keep our phone lines more or less working^[1], and they don't have the disincentive of nobbling a competitor through inaction on the competitor's service tickets. (You did hear the saga of getting our DSL service in Tracy, right?)

[1] we're down to eight kilobits typical peak data rate, often less, and each time Sprint "fixes" our lines, it gets worse. I was getting better data rates than this ten years ago.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I think it's about time you got your congressman involved on this one. 8kbps? that's beyond ridic.

It's better here, I know. DSL here is down to $30/month on sale. I've got to dig out my old Fujitsu tonight and verify with Verizon that it'll work, and then I'm back in the highspeed biz. Verizon is also allowing third-party ISP's to go to unmetered bandwidth, and Qwest (who until just recently I called Qworst) is not only forced to match Verizon's cut-rate sale, but is going a step further and giving you the cut-rate with your choice of ISP.

See, your problem is there's no competition out in the sticks. Sprint can screw you over because there's no other game in town. Here we have the ILEC, three CLEC's, Comcast, and at least one person I know squirts the birdie for their bandwidth (and if I had a shot at South, I would too). There are also two ground-based wireless providers, one of which will give you a free 2MB link in exchange for access to your antenna and power for a repeater. With that kind of competition nobody can afford to piss off anyone too badly, except an ILEC working a CLEC's trouble tickets... and even that has limits.

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm missing something ... what's wrong with 8-cent postcards?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

fiik. I didn't write the fortune.