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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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