No competition for telephones, answering machines, fax machines, PBX's, modems? No competition for long-distance telephone calls?
Do you know when divestiture occurred? Do you know how many years
*earlier* MCI was founded? Do you have any idea when the company now known as Sprint was founded?Do you have any idea how many local telephone lines the company now known as Sprint was serving, in, say, 1976? Would you believe three and a half million lines?
Do you know when MFS started laying its own 'bypass' fiber?
Do you know when Merrill-Lynch laid the first bypass fiber loop in the U.S?
I did not say that. They were *very* interested in the customer -- as a milkable source of revenue.
'Pent up demand" describes a _price-sensitive_ phenomenon.
i.e., where the price is the primary barrier to additional sales.
People want the product, but they _will_not_ buy more of it, at that high price. Drop the price, and people do buy more.
If lowering the profit margin on a product by 25% only brings in 10% more business, you are better off with the smaller volume of sales.
If lowering the profit margin on a product by 10% brings in 25% more business, you are 'money ahead' to do so.
The latter scenario *precisely* describes the situations in which the Bell System lowered prices. They lowered their _profit_margin_ by
*less* than the factor of increased sales, and thus pulled in more money from the customers.Not to those who know the actual history. And that competition *was* there in the profit-making areas, a decade or more before divestiture.
The Bell System's primary _profit_ sources were: (1) value-added business telephone services / equipment, (2) long-distance-derived revenues. Residential service was usually priced at break-even, or maybe a little below that. It was a 'necessary evil', to make the bread-and-butter business services a 'salable' item.
BOTH of those profit sources were under significant competitive pressures, long (as in "well more than a decade") before divestiture.
Not, exactly a ringing endorsement for the approach -- Penn Central's management made so many "smart" decisions that the company went bankrupt and closed its doors.
Revisionist history at work. Computer "time sharing" did not exist _at_all_ before mid-1964. By September of that year, DTSS could handle an amazing =seven= terminals. By 1968, capacity was up to several dozen simultaneous-use terminals.
IBM didn't have an interactive time-sharing system offering until late 1967.
As of 1970 it is doubtful that there were 10,000 simultaneous dial-up 'modem' calls active at any given time, across the entire United States. But the landscape _was_ changing rapidly.
_WHAT_ business?? In Randy's case it *was* just a hobby. No income, no membership 'fees', no nothing. All the expenses came out of his personal pocket.
Well, it was the "Baby Bells" that couldn't handle the demand. didn't have enough physical ports on switches, hadn't properly projected the growth, and didn't have phone numbers to assign. Same management, same planning process.
Where the telco had an existing facility, there was no net savings realized by the fact that the replacement box had a smaller footprint than the box it replaced. Bell System bought/built facilities with planned-for 75-100 year life-spans, _including_ projected growth.
Speed of call set-up is irrelevant to the number of _connected_and_running_ calls that can be handled
Yes there is an advantage. It has nothing to do with the number of connected calls that can be passing through the switch at any given time.
The advantage is that you can set-up/tear-down more calls, with _less_ equipment. As long as you have 'enough' equipment to set-up/tear-down more calls than the system can handle, in _less_ total time than the average duration of a call, the speed of the equipment does not constitute a limiting factor in capacity of the equipment. if the equipment is 'slow', then you merely have to have more elements, to achieve the required overall capacity. When the 'performance limit' is elsewhere -- e.g. as in the number of communications-paths through the matrix -- speeding up the 'common control' equipment has *zero* effect on the number of simultaneous calls that can be handled.
You know not that of which you speak.
You can find percentage figures spelled out in the franchise documents, granting the monopolies.
Western Union and most of the railroads were 'regulated common carriers'. Not regulated monopolies.
Primarily a 1970's and later phenomenon. You can generally count on your thumbs the number of rate increase requests that were _not_ granted in their entirety, between the end of WW 1, and, say, 1965.
That does _not_ answer the question posed, Carterphone opened the door WIDE for third-party suppliers. Allow a couple of years for their first-generation gear to hit the market, and then start looking at _who_ introduces the new capabilities *first*. Aside from "picturephone", I can't think of _one_ where Bell/AT&T/WEco was first.
A fair number. Rolm was the 800lb gorilla of the bunch.
I did not say that. I said that what they did was for *their* advantage first, and if the customer benefited, well, that was an unimportant incidental.
Princes and Trimline were 'marketing gimmicks' first and foremost. The market for 'additional' extension phones was stagnant, if not moribund. Princess and Trimline were "kickers" that marketing could sell up.
'Panel' was an interesting unit -- the house I grew up in had the first, and for more than 10 years, the _only_, residential installation of one of those phones in the entire state. The concept was better than the implementation; maintenance was an ongoing issue. Panel's "marketing gimmick" selling point was "Look, Ma no cord!" when the phone was hung up. As well as not sticking out into the room as far as a regular 'surface mount' wall phone. Bell had the customer's interest _so_much_ at heart that the customer had to _buy_ the enclosure for that phone (at significantly over $100 in 1964 dollars)
*and* 'rent' (at the usual price) all the regular phone innards that were inside it).Home Interphone, and Bell Chime also fell into the category of 'marketing gimmick' _first_, An un-needed high-markup item that 'sales' could artificially create a demand for, and then fill. Primarily a revenue booster.
"All", eh? Including the part of that list that you so carefully cut off?
You are claiming that these features were available on Bell-provided PBX gear on customer premises, before they were available on Bell-provided PBX gear in the central office.
Hint: the SxS _was_not_capable_ of *native* touch-tone operation, a front end translation from touch-tone to pulse was required.
The 'tolerance point' varied by household. _Average_ number of extensions per household, in households with more than one phone, climbed appreciably after introduction of Princess/Trimline, after having been comparatively stagnant for several years ... As in "something close to 80% of the total number of Princess/Trimline phones manufactured".