TC wrote:
> We had a monopoly here, allowing ONLY German Telekom (then called 
> Bundespost) to do business in the field of communications. 

Here we had competition up until 1934 or so. (Legally, 1934. Reality of 
course drags on, or happens before legally required, etc.)  At that point, 
there were so many phone lines that the government granted "regulated 
monopoly" status to AT&T, aka "The Bell System."  Bell was the only company 
allowed to run phone lines.  This legal decision was called the "Final 
Judgment". Anything you hooked up to Bell's phone lines had to be approved 
by Bell.

At the time, things were analog, so it took careful planning to route a call 
across country without swamping the signal with noise every time it went 
through a switch.

But the company was regulated. They had to follow strict accounting rules, 
they had to depreciate things over 30 to 50 years (i.e., they had to buy 
equipment that would work for 50 years before it wore out enough that it 
needed to be replaced), they could only make a certain amount of profit 
(that was, on the other hand, pretty much guaranteed given they were a 
monoply), and they had to service every customer. They even had to pay the 
same rate for the phone on the desk of the guy sitting in the central office 
as you did for the phone in your house. But if you were a park ranger 15 
miles from the nearest central office, you could still get a telephone.

However, this meant that while phone service was remarkably inexpensive for 
the time, and even a tiny portion of the money going to Bell Labs made it 
one of the foremost research organizations in the world for decades, it also 
meant that things didn't really move forward very fast.  ISDN never took 
off, because by the time that 30-year-old mechanical phone switch was paid 
for, we were already up to ADSL and such. You (usually) rented your phone, 
but since AT&T didn't want to pay for new phones, they lasted pretty much 
forever.

http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/test2007/mp_greatestgadget_f.jpg

In the late 1970s, MCI (Michigan Communications Inc or something like that) 
installed digital microwave towers to let truck drivers going between 
Chicago and Minneapolis (or something like that) talk to their bosses. AT&T 
sued MCI, saying they had a government-granted monopoly. AT&T won, but the 
courts revisited the "Final Judgment", decided that since it was no longer 
necessary to carefully control the network (due to digital transmission and 
wireless transmission), they would create a "Modified Final Judgment" in 1984.

The MFJ said that The Bell System gets broken up in to AT&T Long Lines 
(which were not allowed to offer local service, but which were allowed to 
basically charge whatever they wanted etc), and the seven Regional Bell 
Operating Companies (Pacific Bell, New England Bell, etc) who were not 
allowed to provide communication between LATAs (Local Access Telephone 
Areas).  A LATA is basically a city, or one "area code" if you've ever been 
to the USA.

So now you have seven phone companies, and they each have to pay AT&T to 
connect a call to a different LATA, and AT&T has to pay to connect that call 
to the destination. Telephone number information (i.e., looking up what 
would be in a phone book) depends on which city they're in, etc. There's 
even weird crap caused by SS7, which is the protocol used between phone 
switches, because some of the data it transfers (like caller ID) was 
considered "communications", while other data (like busy signals) was 
considered "signaling", so now you had to start counting packets based on 
their type, on a nation-wide network of computers that were never designed 
for such a thing and which were all vitally necessary to continued operation 
of the network.

AT&T wasn't allowed to talk to Bell. They had one year to figure out how to 
give equal access to everyone. Considering the whole routing network was 
based on phone numbers and their prefixes, it was a pretty herculean task. 
It was still causing pain 10 years later.

Plus, the seven RBOCs were still regulated, at least for areas in which they 
had monopolies. So the local companie still had to service every customer, 
blah blah blah. But, local companies that weren't RBOCs didn't have those 
types of restrictions, *and* they got to connect to the RBOC's switches at 
the same rate the RBOCs charged themselves. So a company could come in, hook 
up a fiber from the switch to the new office building, and get all the 
$600/month business phones, and the RBOCs still had to service everyone else 
for the same $20/month they were charging.

So, yeah, it was pretty much the same here.

The new stuff - fiber, cable, cell phones, etc - weren't part of the 
regulated part, so you could have New York Bell competing for your business 
with Pacific Bell for cell phone service, but not wired service.

In any case, at the time of the break-up, we had 56 light-minutes of copper 
wire installed in the USA, and 96%+ had phones in their houses and offices. 
So it's pretty reasonable that say only 15 years after cell phones were 
actually useful, lots fewer people have them here than elsewhere.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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