I know that emotionally that is a soft spot for Western Electric collectors, and it's something we haven't really discussed. Do you think The breaking up of Ma Bell was a Good thing or a bad thing, as far a competition is concerned, and why.
D/P
That seems like a pretty hard one to answer. I think somehow if they didn't break up they would still be a very very different company now from then. if not even somewhere near what they are currently. I think for surely if Ma Bell didn't break up something else for surely would have come along and made it happen or just make them become a very very different company.
lol one thing that IS good about they're break up is that we can now collect the old phones... who know's if that would have been possible if they didn't break apart.
I think it's a good thing that it broke up. A monopoly is never a good thing in my opinion. This allows a single company to have too much sway, especially with the government. Also, if the Bell System was still around today, who knows how much we'd be paying for cell phone and internet services.
Ha, the Ma Bell breakup happened 6 years before I was born. My mom was the same age I am now when it happened. I wasn't there, but complain about it, because as mostly a WE guy I love the Bell System. You all make good points about it being a good thing though. I do love to see remnants of it here and there, like our Verizon payphones at work with the Bell System logo on them and that sort of thing.
I've been considering getting this book to get another view. This much we all know - when the phone company owned the phones, they were made to last. Now we have cheap Chinese made crap.
The Rape of Ma Bell (http://www.amazon.com/Rape-Ma-Bell-Criminal-Telephone/dp/081840468X)
this is a tough question.
according to my co-workers who were w/ the phone company (bell) prior de-regulation, it was a better place to work then. competition forces the company to be much more profit driven. i have seen many changes in my 10yr tenure, as the number of alternate local carriers has grown. more "bean counting"& micro-management. i'll stop short of climbing on the soapbox about the effects all this has on good union jobs.
from a customer stand point, of course, competitive prices are good. also the options available, like choosing what kind of phone we like, where/ how many to have in the house. if the telco still owned all the sets, i imagine there would still be just one or two industry standard models.
who knows what effect telco regulation would have had on internet & cell phone service.
IMHO
At the time of the breakup they were making phones in Asia so the quality was already compromised.
When it came time to divide up the pieces with AT&T retaining the long distance piece, AT&T let the Baby Bells have the cellular piece because they didn't see much of a future in it. Where would cell phone technology be today if the breakup had not happened? Even after they tried to put all the pieces back together again, Bell Labs and Western Electric were already destroyed, so in my opinion, that was the biggest casualty of this government fiasco.
The Rape of Ma Bell can be found for free on-line at the old David Massey site.
> http://www.porticus.org/bell/rapeofmabell.htm <
"Manufacturing the Future" is another good book to read. Cheap copies can be found at Amazon.
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0521651182/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used <
Dougpav
QuoteA monopoly is never a good thing
If we're talking about an unregulated monopoly, that is probably right, and for all the obvious reasons. But the Bell System was a highly regulated monopoly, so the answer may not be so clear, at least to me.
QuoteAT&T let the Baby Bells have the cellular piece because they didn't see much of a future in it. Where would cell phone technology be today if the breakup had not happened?
Remember that the whole concept of cellular telephony was invented by Bell Labs. And its initial deployment was done by the Bell System. Apparently they saw at least that much future in it.
Yes, as a communications engineer, I have a soft spot for the old Bell System, and especially Bell Labs.
The Bell System Memorial site has a good review of the breakup and its results. It may not be entirely objective, of course.
http://www.porticus.org/bell/att_divestiture.html
Bill
In the first half of my lifespan, late forties to late seventies, seemed like every time a major invention came along it had the Bell Labs name on it, What has Lucnet pioneered in the last 25 years ?
D/P
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/BellLabs
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/BellLabs/Research
Basically what happened as a result if divestiture is that the telcos went from being service-oriented and engineering-run operations to sales-oriented and marketing-run. Top notch customer service was doomed, and ultimately deteriorated to the current low levels with someone for whom English is a second language reading from a script halfway around the world from here.
If I recall correctly, customers were able to own their phones prior to the break-up of 1984, but WECo was still cranking them out. It wasn't until the Lucent/AT&T Technologies situation that we started seeing crap that wasn't built to last anymore being billed as the same sort of top-quality product we had been used to seeing from WECo.
I don't think we should rush to the conclusion that divestiture helped speed up technological advances. Plenty of countries in Europe have monopoly situations yet they were light years ahead of us with both cellular service and DSL, and still are to a large degree.
The ruthless (tens of thousands) layoffs we've seen by AT&T over the past few years have all been driven by shareholder demands. I'd wager that they wouldn't have happened if the company was still a monopoly. I put in 17 years with them and would probably still be working for them if not for shareholder greed and Board of Directors cronies who quickly ask "How high?" when those shareholders tell them to jump.
Donna, I hope you voted "FOR" the proposals on our latest proxy forms . . .
i am using divestiture & deregulation as interchangeable terms. this is not really accurate. deregulation refers to wiring & equipment inside the customer no longer owned/regulated by the telco. divestiture is the whole breakup of the monoply allowing alternate providers to enter the scene. there are still government regulations to abide by.
shoddy service is not exclusive to the phone company. it took me about 2 hours this morning to make changes to my cable tv service plan. >:(
btw.....the techs in the field provide excellent service.. ;D :o 8)
As I recall, the breakup of the Bell System was part of a deal to let the phone companies participate in the coming digital data communications revolution in an unregulated fashion. Bell Labs had the technology and they could forsee a future where POTS phones would be dinosaurs.
It's interesting to see it still playing out, as Verizon sells off the "legacy" wireline business in remote areas to Frontier and others, so they could take the hit and declare bankruptcy. Now Verizon and AT&T are petitioning the FCC to make it a national priority to shut down POTS once and for all.
You can follow their posts on the comment system at www.fcc.gov. It's quite entertaining.
Paul;
Thanks for the links, maybe it was because Bell System was such a part of school in the 50's..
D/P
The Bell System sure seemed to be everywhere when we were young.
I still get a charge out of watching how TPC (The Phone Company) was portrayed in the 1967 film "The President's Analyst." Perhaps that sense that the phone company was all-powerful contributed to the Justice Department investigations.
I loved the Bell System films with Dr Frank Baxter, and Richard Deacon, I think also with Ricahrd Carlson. I collect 16MM films and have one of the 'Bell' films. The one, "About Time".
D/P
Quote from: paul-f on April 13, 2010, 03:23:02 PM
It's interesting to see it still playing out, as Verizon sells off the "legacy" wireline business in remote areas to Frontier and others, so they could take the hit and declare bankruptcy. Now Verizon and AT&T are petitioning the FCC to make it a national priority to shut down POTS once and for all.
You can follow their posts on the comment system at www.fcc.gov. It's quite entertaining.
I work with VoIP and cellular technology every day and the thought of POTS going away scares me. VoIP is a neat technology to be sure, but it seems like there are too many moving parts to count on it in situations "when the chips are down." There are a lot of companies out there operating and maintaining VoIP infrastructure that cannot and do not provide the kind of reliable service we expect from a regulated utility. Cellular is much the same way, with oversubscribed/under-engineered networks and coverage issues that are inherent to the technology.
Quote from: Dan/Panther on April 13, 2010, 07:57:17 PM
I loved the Bell System films with Dr Frank Baxter, and Richard Deacon, I think also with Ricahrd Carlson. I collect 16MM films and have one of the 'Bell' films. The one, "About Time".
D/P
Dude,
I sold off about a dozen a few years ago. All 16mm, all bell system.
Jim
i work with POTS everyday.... the thought of it going away REALLY scares me :'(
They're trying to make POT legal in California.... ::) :o ;D
D/P
Donna, I agree that service is suffering everywhere. Aren't businesses supposed to work with you to keep your business, and to keep you a loyal customer. We have DirecTV here, and besides our house, we have a summer house, and the store, with my apartment above. My dad has been trying to get them to give us a deal, and he would set up dish at the summer house and the store/apartment. Of course, we don't NEED dish at the summer house since we only use it a few months of the year, but you'd think they'd be willing to play ball. Not so much.
d/p....... :o :o :o :o :o
btw, it is legal in michigan for some medical conditions
Mixed feelings about the breakup of the Bell System. It was a government regulated monopoly that had to fulfill the requirements of excellent service, reasonable cost, and extensive market penetration to exist and they did that very well. The system was over-engineered by a significant margin, everything from the phones to the networks to the switching. They poured vast amounts of money into fundamental research at Bell Labs and basically invented all the goodies that make modern life so hi tech. Service was legendary, as was quality control, areas they set global standards in. Costs were not cheap, but very stable and reasonable compared to the time. Product innovation was slow.
All of that is gone now. All the telecoms and phone makers are sales and marketing driven. Bell Labs no longer does fundamental research but only works on areas that are immediately marketable. Products have limited life spans and are endlessly being made obsolete on purpose to drive sales. The systems are over subscribed and under engineered, leading to quality of use issues that would never have been tolerated in the old days. Aside from a few areas most service rendered is poor, once they get your cash out of you the next goal is to get more cash out of you, usually that's done by upselling you and not service. Costs are all over the place, no one seems to know what it actually costs to make a phone call today, but you can easily end up spending thousands over two years on that new smart phone which was a "great deal", but conversely you get make free local and long distance calls with services like Google Voice. Innovation is fast paced.
So which era was better? Hard to compare really, it's rather an apples and oranges thing now as the market has changed so much. Would we have had such deep cell phone market penetration under Ma Bell? Who knows really? Would it have cost a lot or a little? Again there is no way to know what might have been.
I think we can compare service between the eras and today's service basically is crap. The only good service experiences that still seem to happen are the tech guys who come out to fix the landline, they are top notch and for a moment it feels like the old days. But don't end up on the phone trying to get your __________ fixed/changed by a service rep, it's agony.
And some things have not really changed at all, most cell phones are sold on contract in the US, which means you are essentially renting the phone every month for the life of that contract. Of course by "selling" it us they don't have to fix it when it breaks, which it will.
And from an environmental perspective the current era is far more wasteful, think of all the e-waste that is generated by the disposable cell and cordless phones and of the last 25 years. Programs like "New Every 2" from Verizon simply add to the problem of waste, but they make sense from a marketing perspective because you have to generate new sales endlessly. (Can you imagine a "New Every 2" program in 1970 for phones?) But it does not appear that the issue of waste and environmental pollution created by the current telecom market is on the radar screen of anyone.
McHeath;
You spent a lot of time thinking about that it seems.
Bwanna;
They want it legal across the board. For personal use.
D/P
well, said mcheath. it is unfortunate that we had to sacrifice the good of yesterday for the innovations of today. :(
d/p well....who wouldn't :o ::) :o ::) 8) ::) :o
It's going to be on the next state wide ballot.
D/P
That legal marijuana is a touchy subject, I personally am against it, because I've seen it wreck a lot of peoples lives, but that's just me.
before anybody gets crazy on me....i was just being silly w/ dan :-[
Bwanna;
No one is going to get crazy on ya...
I would vote no.
I've really obtained a lot of information about ma bell I didn't know, and Pauls posting those links about those to guys winning the Nobel prize for physics, I was surprised.
D/P
I'm going to have to say it's a good thing without Bell. I wasn't alive when the Bell System existed, but our phone company, AT&T isn't bad at all. We never have any issues, and the one time it did they fixed it the same day.
Now we have many providers to choose from. Some are good, and then some are bad. If the Bell System continued, we may not have internet as we know it today. You might have to use WE computers and any unapproved software would be an "unauthorized attachment". There'd probably be no voip, so no free long distance with Google Voice or being able to use C*NET. Plus it'd be ridiculously expensive for a house to have a PBX, and none of us here would have nearly as many phones since they'd be so expensive. That's like collecting 56" plasma tvs! Towards the later years you could buy phones, but that was tricky for the average person and I think they had to be WE only.
There were some positives to the Bell System like higher quality phones, but for us that's not an issue because just because Bell is dead doesn't mean their phones will spontaneously combust! ;D ;D ;D
I was a young teenager when the Bell system broke up. In a way my parents both liked the idea but also dreaded it. Prices went down as competition went up but service started to slide. Also now if any phone wiring went wrong in your house, you had to get it fixed as it belonged to you now. I guess as with anything in life there were pluses and minuses. One thing is for certain though, the phones we all love would've gone by the wayside either way.
QuoteI'm going to have to say it's a good thing without Bell. I wasn't alive when the Bell System existed, but our phone company, AT&T isn't bad at all. We never have any issues, and the one time it did they fixed it the same day.
Now we have many providers to choose from. Some are good, and then some are bad. If the Bell System continued, we may not have internet as we know it today. You might have to use WE computers and any unapproved software would be an "unauthorized attachment". There'd probably be no voip, so no free long distance with Google Voice or being able to use C*NET. Plus it'd be ridiculously expensive for a house to have a PBX, and none of us here would have nearly as many phones since they'd be so expensive. That's like collecting 56" plasma tvs! Towards the later years you could buy phones, but that was tricky for the average person and I think they had to be WE only
All interesting and valid points to be sure, but the problem remains that we just don't know what would have happened had the Bell System remained intact. Perhaps all the technological innovations would have happened anyway, the Bell System remains basically behind them all, they only got implemented by the later Telecom world of post-Bell. Perhaps innovations would not have happened, or been rolled out, at the same pace.
We can compare service and quality of products, and the current era is lacking. We can also compare wastefulness, and we far exceed the Bell System era again. I just think it's hard to predict if we would be using smart phones to surf the web in 2010 if they were all Bell System labeled phones instead of the diverse market of today.
I just got done reading THE RAPE OF MA BELL. Required reading for all phone collectors, especially if you were never in the telecommunications field (like me). The book is well written and gives you a good understanding of how the phone system in this country worked and specifically why the breakup had a negative impact.
This all happened in my recent memory. When I was in High School (early 70s), one teacher had a chart on the outside of his classroom door called "The Wonderful World of AT&T", that listed all the "evils" of Ma Bell. I don't remember exactly what was on it, but I read it many times as I passed it in the hallway. He wasn't one of my teachers so I never got a chance to ask about it. I do remember being confused because all the alleged "evils" listed just seemed to me like models of efficiency and success. ??? So what was wrong with all that? Not a thing. The system worked and it worked so well people took it for granted, e.g. during the 1965 NY blackout, the phones still worked and nobody gave it a second thought. The biggest alleged "evil" of vertical integration worked well with a natural (and regulated) monopoly. Breaking up Ma Bell was like making water, sewer, and electric utilities compete.