I am going to trim the reply from hancock4 just to save a little space and not because I am ignoring his/her very valid points. I don't think Ma Bell was pure, undistilled evil. And quite frankly I was a little too young to have any first-hand knowledge. I know my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles all hated The Phone Company. That seemed to be a common topic when we'd get together, usually circulating around why they didn't call each other more often. I also have bad memories of my parents berating me over unintentional toll calls. I would call a friend across town and get an intercept message instructing me to dial "1" and then the number. I didn't understand at the time that was phone-speak for "This is going to be a toll call".
I spent at least half of my childhood in GTE territory, so I technically wasn't subject of Ma Bell, at least at the local level.
I do understand that AT&T took us from having effectively zero telephone infrastructure to having service in virtually every nook and cranny of our very large nation, and making it one of the most reliable systems of any kind anywhere in the world.
Yes, but what drove the PC industry to give us better computers at lower prices? Competition. If IBM had been granted a de facto monopoly over the computer industry where you could only lease IBM equipment, couldn't modify it, couldn't run non-IBM software, and have to rely on IBM for all repair service, do you think we'd be where we are today with computing?
Did telephone service become cheaper before or after 1/1/1984? It's a serious question, I don't know. I do know with the introduction of competitive cellular plans in the mid to late 90's and the further deregulation of the telephone industry dropped prices considerably. None of that would have been possible if we still had pre-1984 Ma Bell.
Was it cheap? When I read what phone service cost back then and translate into today's dollars, it was outrageously expensive. It's no wonder people relied on letters.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I seem to recall adding $40 to my parent's phone bill with just 5 or 6 calls to a friend from school who lived outside our local dialing area. I doubt I was on the phone for hours.
But did that meet people's needs? I can see maybe a poor pensioner who only made a couple of calls on Sunday. But even then a family of any size used the phone too often to make the dirt cheap plan worthwhile.
But that counters what you said before. It sounds like the cheap service didn't meet people's needs. It seems analagous to offering a cable TV customer a cheap plan, but telling them they can watch only C-SPAN for an hour a day, otherwise they're going to be charge extra. That might work for a few people, but for most it's too restrictive.
AFAIK, we didn't have metered calling in Tampa with GTE. I had an aunt in southern New Jersey who insisted we kept even local calls as short as possible because their calls were metered. She was in what was New Jersey Bell territory.
The people I worked with at AT&T were sharp. They could rattle off the most arcane information about the various switches, etc. As a child I never dealt with anyone with the phone company, but it's my understanding they were rude and unresponsive.
And that may be. But I still hold to my belief that if we hand't broken up AT&T, we would be paying for it today.
I'm sure there was more to it than just goodwill. Properly trained customers would not rely so much on customer support, or could at least maintain some semblance of in-house technical support.
Also, what about companies that didn't additional support? Why should they pay for a service they do not need?
Again though, would equipment costs have dropped without competition? I don't think they would.
It's not my intent to start a flame war. :-) From my vantage point, this is how I see it. I had no direct experience with the phone company until 1987. My family talked about Ma Bell the same way they talked about the IRS or the driver's license folks. And I had two family members who worked for Ma Bell (not my dad who was at GTE, others).
It absolutely baffled me that four years after the break-up, my fellow AT&T employees were still in denial about what had happened. I was hired to write programs, namely dBase and a language called ESCORT, and then later Unix and C. I saw opportunities to computerize our group. They were doing a lot of tasks by hand. I thought it was crazy to have someone print out reams of circuit orders, highlight a certain code, then sort the hundreds of orders by hand and walk them to the appropriate supervisor who would then further breakdown the stack to his/her individual employees to process. I came up with the idea of pulling that information into our 3B2 and emailing it to the proper person, or even using ESCORT to process the orders. It was never even considered. Yes, the manual way kept an entire building's worth of people employed, but at what cost? What if a sheet of paper was dropped or the printer jammed? Was that order lost forever? My last job at AT&T was part of a project to reconcile circuit information versus billing records. It had been such a manual process we had customers out there who had been getting service for free while others, believe it or not, were being billed (and they were paying) for circuits that didn't exist.
I was saddened to see AT&T slowly die over the 90's. But I think they were a victim of their own monopolistic history. I think we, the consumer, are better off today than we would have been had AT&T not been broken up.
John Mayson Austin, Texas, USA
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had the same thing happen to me in about 1977 or so. I was living in a residential hotel on the near north of Chicago, which had switchboard service in each room. I chose to have a private phone put in my apartment plus the hotel switchboard phone. For one _year_ afterward, I did not get a bill for it. Someone in outside plant somehow lost the paperwork, and billing did not get it, so as they were concerned, the line was still not in use.Then one day after about a year, some @#$@@%$ phreak decided to charge a long distance call to my number. Charges went through the system but 'fell out' when the billing department tried to bill my number. The bogus charge went into the 'suspense' account where it sat for another month until a 'suspense analyst' got around to working on it. Telco tried their usual tricks (calling the distant end, claiming 'our operator made a mistake in copying down the number of the person who called you' etc ... asking that person to help identify the caller, but they decided the call _did_ 'belong' to my number. Suspense analysts' next trick was to try dialing my number to see if it was a working number, he found out it was. Next call was to plant asking them 'when did you turn on this line, and why don't we have the paper work?' When the first bill came to me in the mail, it was for service to the date of the bill (13 months) PLUS the usual service for one month in advance, AND (but of course!) the bogus long distance call. Several hundred dollars for the total bill!
I called Miss Prissy and appealed to her: would she please write off the charges to that date and let me start fresh from there? Her response was "you knew good and well what was going on, you hoped we would not discover it!" The old Bell was pretty good about writing off almost anything at least once but she would not do it. "All I can do is give you a payment plan of three months to pay it, and I will write off the bogus long distance call. After all, you _knew_ what happened was wrong!" I could not legitimatly argue with that; it only took me a month or two after the bills did not show up each month to know something was wrong. I told her thanks, and agreed to her repayment plan. PAT]