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AT&T to Leave Residential Business
Herve writes "Just got it from a press release on the AT&T website: 'AT&T will no longer be competing for residential local and standalone long distance customers. The company stressed that existing residential customers will continue to receive the quality service they expect from AT&T; however, the company will no longer be investing to acquire new customers in this segment.'"
I just got a holographic postcard that must have cost a buck each from them advertising their *residential* VoIP service. Maybe they don't want to raise the ire of the feds and their competitors by saying "Hey everybody we were given a thorough beating with a clue stick and now realize that digital delivery to the end user is the way to go."
The end of analog phone service is here.
This spells a desolate future for AT&T residential subscribers. When a company isn't actively going after business, they aren't actively *keeping* business, and therefore the quality of service rapidly declines until that segment is folded. I give it two years of hell and then a skillful withdrawal from the residential market.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Their phone calls were annoying, and after an experience with three consecutive rude customer service people back in 2000 I swore I would never do business with their consumer arm again.
My grandfather and uncle were both Western Electric engineers, so it's kind of in the family working for AT&T (their part went to Lucent). After the breakup it was all over for that company, they couldn't do anything right. PC marketing, Unix marketing, selling leased lines, every time I dealt with AT&T it was a hassle and they were inferior to their competition.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Competition is just doing its job. :)
So this is now an admission of, basically, "Yes, we've been pestering people on the phone when they're at home to join AT&T, but it isn't working, so we give up"?
Not exactly. Twenty years ago, ATT was THE phone company, encompassing what Verizon, SBC, Qwest, etc., are today. When they were split up, all those companies could only do local phone service, and ATT was the long distance company.
Now everything's been all jumbled up, and everybody can do everything. So this incarnation of ATT is more like MCI or Sprint than it is Qwest or Verizon.
Could this be the end of Carrot Top's carreer?
If you are still using AT&T for home phone service, you deserve what you get. This should give these folks the impetus to go out and shop around. Using AT&T for phone service is like using AOL or MSN for internet access (at least from a price perspective). There are soooo many better deals available, why would you even want to use AT&T?
The execs are just reading the tea leaves here, and they have decided that they can't compete. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
The company stressed that existing residential customers will continue to receive the quality service they expect from AT&T :) </wisenose-mode>
<wisenose-mode>that a good thing or a bad thing?
So, let me get this straight... with AT&T being one of the most frequent to violate the do-not-call list, they are no longer seeking to provide residential service? Isn't that sort of like biting the hand that you annoy the hell out of? I assume it was just no longer profitable, but the interesting thing is that not only will it save AT&T money, it will save everbody else money and time, until they figure out something new to call and bother us about.
will this become a trend, is residential phone service diminishing in value to such phone companies. we all know about how cell phones are becoming a our primary way of communicating (not that this is a good thing), will these companies give up on us and just focus in on business solutions?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
I can finally answer my phone again without fear that an AT&T telemarketer will be haranging me.
After working there 21 years, it was easy to see that the company had become just a shadow of its former self. There's not much left other than the name. People still associate the name with the 1.1 million employee behemoth that it used to be. Back in the day, doing things right was the way things got done. Now, at less than 60k employees, saying its done is job one, and making it work (or not) is an afterthought. It's really sad.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Most phone carriers make more money off of businesses to help subsidise lower costs for residential users.
In the press release, ATT seems to justify this decision by saying that:
According to industry estimates, more than 40% of American households have now migrated to some combination of bundled communications services. Recent regulatory decisions make it financially infeasible for AT&T to offer a competitive bundle of services to consumers. AT&T has determined that it cannot effectively compete against bundled competition by selling only standalone LD.
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold AT&T Broadband.
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Since divestiture in the 80's, technical expertise took a second seat to
climbing the managerial org chart. PHB MBAs rose to the level of their
incompetency, and investment in the future was traded for the next quarter's
profit numbers. Real talent, the people that actually invented things and
did the creative work, either retired or left for greener pastures.
AT&T had deep enough pockets, so they could stumble around and
sell off assets for almost twenty years. It's finally reached the point that
that business model can no longer sustain itself. Shame really.
One Bell System. It Worked.
For years, in the UK, I thought that AT&T was the
...
height that all companies should try to strive to.
In 1996 I moved to the US. I started out with NYNEX who weren't much of a problem, however,
when they became Verizon, I decided to try AT&T.
What a fucking disaster. They blocked my 3rd party
DSL installation for months without providing any
reasons to the 3rd party provider. They refused
to let me carry my phone # even though I was
moving from one apartment to another, in the same
building. They started to heavily spam my snail
mailbox even though I was now a customer of
theirs. After months of this crap I dropped them in favor of Verizon - that was 3.5 years ago. In March, this year, they started sending me phone bills (containing no calls) even though I told
them to fuck off years ago.
My god what a hassle it was to get them to stop...
when I finaly got through to one of their drones
the excuse was that verizon had not told them, 3.5 years back, that they do not have my business
any more. The _really_ sad thing is that when I terminated service, verizon, myself and AT&T were
on a party line where verizon confirmed that they
would be dealing with me and AT&T was out of the picture - I believe that is required by law.
They stopped for a month and started again. After serveral months of this they have now started to
send me bills with a balance of zero(0). Man!
what an inept and fucking wasteful company. I
shudder to think what it is like to work there
I hope they burn in hell. Its no wonder no one wants to deal with them.
- Moomin
Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend?
in a nutshell? Poor Management.
They made really bone-headed decisions. They bought TCI an dother cable companies in an attempt to get into the cable biz but lacked the management that understood cable (and let go all the top management from those cable companies.) They acquired MediaOne cable in 2000 and that caused a HUGE amount of infighting because the mediaOne people were not made to conform and join the team which created a huge us/them inside the company further ripping it apart until Comcast acquired the cable arm and started to fix what was wrong.
Their advertising wing switched form giving the company a good image to the annoy everyone to hell with telemarketing. They refuse to keep tight reigns on their telemarketing companies so slamming by AT&T is a common occourance.
Overall the management of AT&T is watching the company spiral the drain and have no idea how to fix it.
It's the same cause at every failed company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Think back about 10-15 years ago. If someone would have told me that AT&T would be getting out of this segment I wouldn't laughed for awhile...
A very, VERY big part of it was losing the biggest single phone contract in the world, the United States Government FTS (Federal Telephone Service), to MCI a few years ago.
It is the maintenance of this contract that has kept MCI afloat despite its woes and which, coupled with AT&T's rapid expansion (TCI, etc.), has led to AT&T's dramatic fall in the residential marketplace.
I would also guess that the extreme growth in cellphone and DSL use has hurt AT&T, since more and more people are using those technologies instead of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for home use.
Maybe now they'll finally stop calling me at dinner time.
What the hell business do they have left if not for residential and stand alone customers? Its like McDonalds deciding not to sell hamburgers anymore.
They're selling their cellular business to Cingular, they're not doing land lines any more, what's left? Do they have any other revenue producing businesses?
I imagine they're not betting the farm on Plan 9...
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
This makes me rather glad that I didn't sign up for their "local and long distance" plan that 'my friend' Jeanine at AT&T offered me last night.
AT&T felt that current regulations for the Baby Bells favored the Baby Bells in areas which they held monopolies. At the same time Baby Bells are being allowed to offer long distance, AT&T feels the rates Baby Bells charge them put them at a competitive disadvantage.
If what AT&T says is true, I would get out of the business too.
The number of US landline phones declined by 5 million since 2000, while 7.5 million people overall have made the switch to exclusive cellphone use in the US.
Some Stats
good political satire
A big part of the reason for that is that the Bell Labs division went to Lucent when it split off. I think it's terrible that Lucent is on it's last legs, most people have no idea how many innovations came out of that group of people.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
The phone company generated a lot of ill will amongst their customers-with-no-choice in the 60's and 70's (see Lily Tomlin's character, Ernestine) altho their stock was always considered a good stable investment that you could pass on to your children. If history is any guide, and it often is NOT, we just might see this same pattern of crumbling happen to Msft in 20/30 years, if not sooner - a great investment, but lots of PO'd customers. Once the customers wise up to what's going on and seek better alternatives those vast monopoly profits won't be guarenteed.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Well, they can't cold call as many people at dinner time anymore because of the Do Not Call list, and I really doubt Carrot Top would actually attract new customers...
Since I dumped AT&T's long distance, they have been mercelessly and relentlessly calling and begging me to come back. Since I had a prior business relationship, it doesn't matter that I'm on every do-not-call list I know of. They can still legally annoy me for 18 months. It also doesn't matter that I tell them to take me off their list and stop calling. They're still trying to endear themselves to me. Might work.
As for VoIP, I'll keep my POTS a while longer. A year or so ago, 40% of all public IP traffic was spam sent by wide open brodaband zombie PCs. Now, it's at least 70%. See a trend here?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Thoolie asks...
"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"
There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.
For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.
Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.
Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.
While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.
From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.
Happy hunting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
They are also doing strange things like direct withdrawal from your checking account w/o permission even though you pay them by check.
I have a $40/month plan that allows me unlimited calls to the UK (24/7). I've not yet found anyone else that has such a plan...
Sure it worked from a technology and management perspective, but with no competition do you think we would have seen the levels of innovation and competition we've seen.
The facts of interoperability and opening standards have done much to push the state of the art and create new products.
What would ATT have given us as a monolith? The Intelligent Network, ISDN (maybe), and not much more.
When AT&T will no longer be competing for residential local and standalone long distance customers...
...that's mLife
(Does this make me a troll?)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
This is a big step forward for AT&T in their conversion from the bedrock of American technology to a two-bit credit card and cable TV operation.
Thank heavens for this, maybe more people will be spared the hell I had to go through with that bastard of a company.
I had AT&T when I moved to my first apartment out of college. I had had them for college long-distance and thought it was ok, not knowing better. After a year of struggling whenever I wanted to switch plans or adjust information on my bill, and constantly getting phone calls from them for different services, I decided when I moved to my current house, AT&T would be taken out with the garbage.
So, I cancelled 2 weeks before I left the apartment (with a long and arduous phone call with a really nasty, nasty woman) and signed up with Sprint (who were and continue to be just as friendly and helpful as heck). For 4 months after I moved and my long distance had switched, I still got bills from AT&T...mostly just the minimum, but it started building up. I got nasty letters telling me about collection, lawyers, etc. So I sent back a nasty letter, detailing that I had cancelled, if they'd check their damned records, and there was no way in hell I would pay anything.
An apologetic letter arrived that stated that they'd be glad to terminate my account and my balance would be erased. Well, good.
6 months later, I receive a bill from AT&T. $0.00 owed. I throw it in the trash. Six months from that, the same thing...zero dollars owed, thanks for being a great customer. More head scratching followed, paper wafts towards circular file.
I haven't lived at the apartment for 4 years now -- the phone number changed when I moved to my new house and it hasn't been reused for anyone. About every 6 months I still receive a bill from them for $0 that I look at, giggle, and then throw in the trash, amused at the sheer stupidity of it all.
Blog,Twitter
If there were other methods, then please list them. Bell was a complete monopoly, and you either did it thier way or the highway. And I mean that literally. You either used the Bell phone, or sent your messages via the postal system (or walked them yourself).
Do you like having a cordless phone? Or perhaps you would rather go back to renting your single phone.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes.
/month for everything.' Never do they adjust for inflation: $35 in '75 would be $124.78 in '03. See for yourself http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
Yup, poor mabell. Nevermind that there has been alot of innovation since the split, and prices keep going up!
People that tell me that say 'I used to pay just $35
Michael Armstrong is what happened to AT&T. Big bonuses at the top, worse working conditions at the bottom, confusion and frustration over calling plans and services, and AT&T systematically dismantled its research division over time. Lucent used to be one of the biggest innovators on the planet, but it was left to rot from within. The cellphone division was doing well, but they decided to spin it off.. and then they decide to get rid of the cell segment (which was making money) and keep the LD segment (which was losing money rapidly). AT&T put a lot of money into absolutely stupid schemes like trying to get control of the local market again through HFC, fixed wireless, and normal local services.
Then you've got the price war that erupted through the 90s. Five cents a minute for domestic interstate LD is cutting the margin so close that AT&T actually claims to be losing money.
Put all this together and it begins to form into an unpleasant picture. I worked there a few years ago. They laid a few hundred of us off in the summertime, then gave the very top huge bonuses for christmas.
That should be prices keep going down, not up..
...and seen that spending $1000 on my $20 of long-distance business wasn't worth it.
Of course they wish to reassure their existing customers, but we all know what that means. So who else provides reliable long-distance without amazing trick T&C, for the inevitable day when AT&T's residential long-distance customer base has dwindled to the point that either their service suffers or they decide to hang it up and sell us, yard-sale style, to a passing former competitor?
When the phone companies were split up, I retained my AT&T long distance account out of habit and inertia. One day my bank offered free trials of their online bill-paying service, so I tried it out, with no problems with any company--except AT&T.
The service says to allow one week for payment. I authorize payment THREE weeks before the bill is due. Online screen shows bill as "paid" TWO weeks before it is due. AT&T claimed the payment was two days late. After a lot of phone calls the bank got me an image of the cancelled check showing it was, in fact, cashed ONE week before the bill was due. Got that?
Now get this. Remember, this is the first month I'm using the online bill-paying service, and have never paid a bill late before (in something like twenty years), didn't pay this one late, and even at the beginning AT&T acknowledged having received payment.
I start getting obnoxious calls every evening from a collection agency.
Even after AT&T acknowledges that the bill was paid, the collection agency keeps calling.
Even after AT&T says the collection service has been told to stop, it keeps calling. (The collection agency, or at any rate the people who are calling me, say they have no record that AT&T has told them to stop).
Even after I mail the collection service full documentation of everything, including screen shots of the bank's online bill-paying records and the image of the cancelled check, they keep calling and people at the collection agency tell me they have received the records and everything is OK, the collection agency keeps calling. (The people who are calling claim not to have been told to stop by the people at the agency who acknowledged receiving the records).
EVENTUALLY they do stop.
At this point I'm a tiny little bit furious so I fire off an angry letter to the office of the president of AT&T telling the story, opining that a refund of the month's bill would be fair recompense for my bad treatment and that if they'll do that we'll call it even and I'll stay with AT&T.
I get a phone call on my answering machine from the president's office saying they completely understand and agree are sorry it all happened and they will send me a check for $65 and want to keep me as a customer.
The check doesn't arrive.
Here is a company that could have easily kept me as a customer. The only, single, solitary thing they needed to do was not to actively drive me away.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
But does Google News have the insightful commentary that comes with each and every Slashdot story?
Hah, I didn't think so.
AT&T has been in a downward spiral for a long time. This is just more retrenching. They are being marginalized away.
I heard one old engineer say he'd had tried to get a job with AT&T but they found out his parents were married when he was born and wouldn't hire him.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
One word, 'transistor'. AT&T when they were a monopoly arguably the best R&D, Bell Labs. The thing with R&D is you're basically paying a bunch of smart people to go play and use their imagination. So you have these people who probably come up with a few thousand ideas that amount to crap and occasionally come up with something like the transistor. Thats really hard for a bean counter to reconcile. They traded that for several years of profits but nothing really new, Who knows what Bell Labs may have come up with that AT&T would have had the rights to.
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
Those problems weren't so much a quirk of AT&T so much as the result of regulation. I mean, I'm sure AT&T lobbied for those rules, but Congress and regulators bit on it, the blame deserves to be shared.
The irony of that whole situation was that AT&T was a monopoly by law, but that it was broken up while leaving the enabling laws in place... so instead of one big monopoly, we had a handful of smaller ones. Worse, the distinction between "local" and "long-distance" calling was always an arbitrary one... government tried to structure the industry to fit their regulatory tariff scheme. Should anybody be surprised that it didn't work?
AT&T's problems seems to be that it was built for the regulatory age. When it tried to compete in the newer, less-regulated markets, it was just another player, not as hungry as the newcomers, and burdened with old business that it had to protect.
If AT&T had never been split up, I think we would still be making calls using a big rotory dial phone. Or you could pay $5 a month extra for tone dialing. Long distance would be $1 a minute. DSL would be unheard of. Sure this would all be federally regulated, but it's not hard to convince the regulators to let you raise rates as long as you put together a business case for it. Despite some of the headaches, deregulation is the best thing to ever happen to telecom. It worked out well for many companies, and would even have benefitted AT&T if they hadn't enormously screwed up.
This is 2 days old... Google News already has 402 Stories about this. Yawn...
I don't think Slashdot will dupe this story 402 times, but you never know. . .
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The big hoot at the end is when they say "Tell Him We'll just get another Phone Company!".
30 years ago this idea was a joke.
-- ac at work
Disney announces that 2D animation is no longer viable, despite the fact there are over 400 animation studios in Japan. So, Disney doesn't make animated movies any more, and AT&T doesn't sell phones any more.
Remember when business was about building products and selling them? I think most of us still had jobs then.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I just canceled a long term agreement to use AT&T for my long distance carrier, and went to the Freedom plan from Verizon.
Why?
1. The about 30 minutes a month we were using cost as much or more in the average month.
2. I pay my bills online. 3 months ago I scheduled their payment to go out 7 days ahead of the due date, a standard practice.
The check got there a couple of days past the due date and some asshole turned it over to a collection agency, who was of course out of state. They called me at 8:55 pm 3 different days to rag and otherwise irritate me into paying a measely $47 bill that I already had a bank statement showing it had been paid, and AT&T themselves told me that it had been paid when I called them. The collectors people were the most obnoxious people I've tangled with on the phone in a decade or more, and I used up most of a 15 minute monolog's worth of swear words discussing their geneology with them. It took over 2 months to get that collector off my back and that forever turned any inclination I had for AT&T's service off forever.
AT&T was a fine, long term business, till some jerks managed to get themselves jobs in accounts receivable. AT&T should either prepare to sink in the long term view, or do some weeding in accounts receivable. Either way, they are going to do it without me, who has been a customer of theirs for 69 years.
Cheers, Gene
Not to mention the $150/month it cost to rent an answering machine in the mid 70's.
OTOH, those extortionate prices the government allowed them to charge came with a catch: universal phone service. AT&T had to wire every home and business that wanted phone service, anywhere in the country, no matter how much it cost. If the phone system was always the anarchic mosh pit it is today, large amounts of the country would never have been wired.
(Think of the places that still don't have cable, both remote areas too far from anything, and inner cities where the cable company isn't willing to dig up the streets to wire up the last few buildings.)
My main observation as a former AT&T employee (I worked first in Bell Labs, then in AT&T Labs (after the split with Lucent)) is as follows:
In a regulated monopoly, you negotiate your profits, deadlines, and budget with the government. In this situation, it's to your advantage to give yourself *a lot of slack,* and do what you know is well within your capacity.
There's no pressure to compete with other companies, so, if you set your quotas right, you don't have to work so hard. Everyone rides along on the system. Projects don't have to profitable to be continued, and profitable projects can be killed for political reasons without affecting the bottom line.
AT&T continued to operate this way, even though they were no longer a regulated monopoly. It really isn't surprising: Imagine you're a manager who's spent your entire 20+ year career in this environment, without ever encountering business conditions elsewhere. How could you know anything otherwise?
I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of sharp, hardworking people at AT&T with decades of hard-core experience in every aspect of communications (there are). What I am saying is that, for the most part, they don't seem to be in strategic decision-making positions. Hence the current mess.
And now I feel ORPHANED! Will Aunt Bea come over to take care of me?
Best Buy can have you arrested
You're not dealing with AT&T!
Best Buy can have you arrested
AT&T Wireless has never actually been part of the main AT&T parent company. It's always been a completely distinct and separate entity, only licensing the rights to use the "AT&T" moniker in order to get brand name recognition. Now AT&T Wireless is in the process of being assimilated into the SBC (Southwestern Bell) borg collective's wireless Cingular division.
Everybody seems to be missing the reason for this.
l
b =wn&q=fcc+bush+telecom+act+1996&btnG=Search+Ne ws
While their service sucked AND they were annoying us with switch calls the real culprit was Bush and the FCC.
http://gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/26319-1.htm
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&ta
They got rid of the regulations about unbundling the local copper so the local carrier can charge AT&T whatever they want.
Expect others to leave that market soon as well.
"You heard it here first: the voice business is dead. Repeat: it's not even a commodity; it's doomed. The telcos know it, too." [Wired 3.07]
It panned out to this - just 10 years later.
because all they're doing is substituting SBC/etc's marketing and accounting weasles for their own. It's the same network, they just give you an additional point of failure for no significant benefit.
Cell phone companies have their own networks. Cable companies doing telephone service have their own network. Reselling a regulated monopoly's service and calling it "choice" is a joke.
Hey AT&T: take your $billions and build us fiber-to-the-home (or close as you can) high-speed Internet access. THAT I'd pay for. But you've probably pissed away too much cash to do that at this point and were never smart enough to begin with.
AT&T didn't just randomly decide to get out of the residential business over night. Due to the courts over turning the FCC UNE-P laws that allow CLEC's to compete AT&T is looking at a rather large increase in costs(as are all other CLEC's) because the baby bells have thus far gotten there ways and are raising CLEC rates by enough that it isn't possible to make enough money to make it worth while.
It will be interesting to see what actually happens once the FCC's interm rules come out to give some guidence to the bells/clec's to play fair as thus far most of the bells/clec's havn't, clec's want rates to stay the same, Bells want the rates to go up enough that they can get customers back without having to lower there rates anymore.
While this is fairly new news AT&T announced a week or 2 ago that it would no longer offer residential service in 5 to 10 states so the writing was on the wall then.
With Qwest, I get .05 a minute, in state and out of state, with no monthly fee, no monthly minimum, no per call minimum and a $20 cap. Once I reach $20 then it's free after that.
As it happened, my wife's friend took a turn for the worse and we spent 4 to six hours on the phone over the course of a few days talking over whatever it is she needed to "express" (women...). My wife used the 1-800-CALL-ATT number, telling them to bill the LD to our home phone. Imagine my shock and horror when the AT&T bill arrived singing a tune of almost $700. The heartless bastards had no mercy... any and all pleading for mercy ended "Well... that's what you owe us... pay up or else." It took me 3 months to get them to knock a couple hundred off just to close the matter out, but it was their deceptive advertising that caused the problem in the forst place.
May AT&T's corporate soul, if it still has one, rot in corporate hell.
Quality of service and AT&T in the same sentence? AT&T historically has awful customer service and it is no mistake that they are leaving the residential market. How pathetic.
Is there a reason people continue to get long distance service?
Other than that some local telephone monopolies (in geographic areas where any existing CLECs refuse to market to residences) require all residential customers to carry long distance service?
Is there some major advantage over calling cards (besides having to enter a number every time you make a call)?
Many of the cheap "2 cent per minute" calling cards one finds at a gas station have a 50 cent per call connection fee, even when the call isn't made from a pay phone.
One investment firm derated their stock to "junk bond" status, joining the ranks of once-mighty firms like Charter Cable. Another firm's report has labeled the company as a "prospect for a takeover, or buyout".
IMHO, if they don't do something mighty desparate here shortly, they will be permantenly mired in the red with no way out of it except for selling out, or bankruptcy.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
swv3752 writes...
"If there were other methods, then please list them. Bell was a complete monopoly, and you either did it thier way or the highway. And I mean that literally. You either used the Bell phone, or sent your messages via the postal system (or walked them yourself).
Do you like having a cordless phone? Or perhaps you would rather go back to renting your single phone."
Other methods? Let's start with a regulatory mandate that Bell HAD to allow competing devices to be connected IF they met Bell System technical specs. Even during the 'monopoly' years, the Bell System contracted with companies other than WE to make their hardware. One good example would be Elgin Electronics, who made several types of voice couplers for the express purpose of -- guess what? -- safely connecting third-party devices to the phone lines.
Another example would be Precision Components. They made (and, as far as I know, continue to make) speakerphone equipment. Their model PC-4A was a near-exact clone of the Western Electric Type 4A, and I have reason to believe that Precision was a WE subcontractor for a while.
It's ironic that, in the years following divestiture, the FCC established EXACTLY the kind of third-party equipment registration program I mentioned above. All I'm saying is that I think it could have been done WITHOUT breaking up a system that, while it had plenty of faults, actually WORKED, and had nationwide standards where equipment and protocols were concerned.
What makes you think that cordless phones, or any of the other modern goodies we've got today, would never have come along without the breakup?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
At least it gets rid of more scum resellers. Like the one that came to every door in this neighborhood with the intent of switching people over to AT&T Local Service. The reseller pitched it as "a phone upgrade from Verizon that'll get everything on one telephone bill".
Back in '74 I was nine years old. My dad had just recently finished adding a new bedroom to our house in Fremont, CA. It was to be my mom's sewing room. My grandfather, a guy who knew his way around building electronic things, put together a Heathkit speaker phone. (Pretty neat piece of hardware actually). Figured my mom could use it while sewing.
A few weeks after the room was finished, I was in there checking things out. The phone range. Picked up. A very threatening guy was on the phone asking me questions like: "Is there an unauthorized phone connected to your house? It appears that there is..." I answered "no there isn't" - since, even at 9 years old, I knew your weren't supposed to install non-sanctioned phones. More questions followed, including threats of discontinued service. I let my parents know. They said not to worry. But I do know there were more calls from the phone company, and a visit. The cool Heathkit phone vanished from the house and I never saw it again. It was preplaced with a Princess phone...
Deregulation certainly stopped this sort of activity! Interesting story at least...
Last I checked, I still payed extra for tone dialing ($1/month), but I haven't looked in a while. Still, I agree with you. If AT&T was still together, I'm pretty sure the internet wouldn't be as good today. They'd have found some way to "tax" it.
This isn't off topic, I atleast left a link 400 other sources on this topic!!! I can maybe understand moding to zero, but to -1. You Moderators a bunch of Slash Dot Fascists!!!
Looks like the long distance companies are taking a hit! No more ATT telemarketers!
The long distance included with the cell phones are hitting the big LAN line corps.
AT&T has been sending me checks for years to switch over. One of those where you cash the check, and your long distance provider changes. Some of them have been $20 and some of them have been as high as $100. I always cash them, wait for the change, then call MCI and get frequent flyer miles for switching back to them. It's an easy scam, and takes no more than 5 minutes every month. But I guess it's dead now.
Am I the ONLY one here that has actually used AT&T local service? (as in they were my carrier for local-only calls) Everyone is spouting about their long distance service, which I have never used, but I have been an AT&T local service customer for the past two years.
Over the years I had become so disgusted from my dealings with Ameritech/SBC that when I heard AT&T was providing local service in my area, I signed up right away. I figured ANYTHING had to be better than SBC. I had always found SBC/Ameritech's customer service reps to be rude, incompetant and just plain lazy. It was commonplace to have to call back multiple times to have a change made because the reps simply didn't do their jobs. And before you could hang up they would hound you like vultures trying to get you to buy their stupid add-on services.
Being an AT&T customer was an enlightening experience. Every single time I called them for any reason the representative was very polite and efficient. They were so good I even went out of my way to report one of their reps for being so helpful and nice. The price was the same as SBC +/- $1. I had my bill automatically charged to my credit card each month and never had a problem in two years. (trying cc billing with Ameritech resulting in getting overbilled and I had to discontinue it).
In short, AT&T local service was like the opposite of Ameritech/SBC. AT&T represented everything I wanted from a phone company. After two years with them I cancelled my service last month only because I'm moving and I'm going to be without a phone for a while, but I was sorry I had to leave them, and I'll be bummed if I wont be able to sign up for their local services at my new place.
They've been pulling those kinds of moves for years. Too me it's like eating your children during a famine. It's better to die with dignity sooner than to die in shame a few days later.
It seems to be a common trend in the country to turn on your customers before you go bankrupt.
This company is the father of the Linux you all love to use today.
Not necessarily. Had MIT installed a different proprietary OS in 1984, Stallman would have become fed up with its publisher's policies and would have based GNU on that rather than on UNIX, giving it a different acronym. The Christmas tree guy who wrote the Minix book would probably have cloned some other kernel as well.
wireless was a giant bastard. many AT&T employees lost their asses in the IPO.. the company generated instant HATE by most of it's employees towards the company. Then AT&T wireless became knows and the worst service in america to most population centers. unlike verison where you can bring your broken phone to any center for replacement you had to mail your AT&T phone somewhere and then recieve and activate your replacement 3-4 days later. outages were comon and centurytel in minnesota refused to allow AT&T costomers to roam. so no service in an area that showed up as roam.
again, failures at management.
Cringely has an article on this a couple of weeks ago.
2 4. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200406
This seems like another bonehead move by bad management. AT&T already has a proven and PAID FOR infrastructure. Yet they cannot seem to figure out how to make any money off of it. Instead they want to spend loads of money building out a new VOIP instructure to create what is arguably an inferior service.
You are uninformed.
This announcement refers to AT&Ts residential long distance service. AT&T's service is at very competitive rates and provides very good fidelity compared to their competitors. I've tried several phone cards, Sprint & MCI and AT&T by far provides me with the clearest international long distance calls - all this for a price that's cheaper than what Sprint or MCI offer in their best plan.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Lets see- our telephone service si still just as good (I haven't had a failed call in... ever), we have greater innovation (caller id, 3 way calling, voice mail, etc are now standard, Ma Bell resisted any of them), we have the ability to own our own phones (and better quality phones, cordless phones, etc), and we now have real competiton resulting in far lower prices (we would never have seen flat rate local calls or 5 cents a minute under a monopoly). Calling long distance was a major evern under Ma Bell due to cost, calling my parents across the country is now an almost daily occurence.
So we have cheaper prices, more competition, and greater innovation now than then. How exactly was the breakup bad?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
For people around New England the best offers appear to be from http://rnktel.com
...Purchase
...Talk 1000
10 percent off verizon calling plans.
Also a 1/2 or 1/3 cent per minute USA long distance offer... Talk 1000
Wait a bit longer for illustrative images of the products to appear
where you click on
but first click in the left sidebar on
at
http://rnktel.com
AT&T used to own the former Bell LECs along with Bell Laboratories and Western Electric. AT&T and the kids called themselves "The Bell System", everybody else called them "Ma Bell" or "the phone company". The former Bell LECs and half of Bell Labs was divested from AT&T on 1/1/1984. You can thank the DOJ and Judge Greene for it. On January 1st, 1984, nobody knew exactly what had happened and everybody's mom and dad was asking what long distance company they should go to. This was also the beginning of the $4.77 telephones era, these really cheap phones were just a handset with a cord attached to them and they had a lifespan was measured in weeks.
Seriously, even with the political momentum behind the privitization of public utilities, would such a move have been popular had AT&T not been requiring that we buy our phones from them? Think about how stupid that sounds today. MS is bad, but at least you have the *option* to install other software on your computer, even if it's hard to buy one without their OS!
Some day there will be a monopoly which will understand that it can continue to make money and have a monopoly just as long as it's willing to give it's users *exactly* what they want.
The alternative to breaking up AT&T would have been more regulation of AT&T... which neither the management nor political leadership wanted. A smart management would have caved on the areas that might have required regulation, or would have *asked* for more regulation "just so we know what is OK to do". But the execs hadn't learned the difference between running a state-sanctioned utility and running a strictly-for-profit corporation in biz school, which is really too bad, because they managed to loose their government-sponsored monopoly as a result of their actions.
Then again, having a free-market-type system working in the space of telecom has helped *some* consumers, though mostly large corporations, as usual.
Got to correct you.
Qwest was never part of AT&T, U.S. West was and Qwest merged with US West and the new company is called QWEST.
This whole debacle goes back to 1982 and the setlement AT&T offered.
All the govermnment was looking for was the removal of AT&T's exclusive manufacture or control of equipment and allowing resale.
What AT&T offered instead was a breakup, spinning off the Local Exchange Loops (percieved as more expensive to operate and less lucerative in profits).
So far it looks like everything has gone according to plan with the exception of the 1996 Telecommunications act which allowed Local Exchange Carriers into the Long Distance game and didn't provide proper provisions for allowing access to the local Exchange by the LD carriers.
In the end it really doesn't matter because if you look at the boards of all these companies you will see that all the players are interchangable and are really playing the same game.
I read someone earlier that said that all the innovation we have had would not have happened without the breakup. False.
These changes were coming with or without a breakup.
It was all a matter of regulation, Tymnet, CompuServe, Delphi, Fidonet, and The Source were fledgeling precursors indicating a commercial evolution of something approximating an internet.
FCC regulation was opening bandwidth to mobile phone technology.
And hardware innovation only required the removal of WECO exclusivity, which the government was going to impliment with or without a breakup.
The innovation could have actually been greater if the network itself had remained intact.
This explains why the number 4 telemarketer, Reese Brothers, closed their Altoona office. How can you sell ATT Long distance when ATT isn't even in the business. Oddly they blame the DoNotCall list, when in fact it was all ATT.
Damn, I'm sick of people who keep complaining that someone else broke the news with every new Slashdot story.
SLASHDOT ISN'T A #&@! NEWS WIRE! It's a discussion forum!
There's a lag in new stories for a reason. We come to Slashdot to TALK ABOUT THE STORIES, ideally after we've read the news, thought about it for a bit. The posts modded "insightful" aren't knee-jerk reactions, they're thoughtful and come from knowledge and consideration. If you want the get the day's news and make uninformed wisecracks, go to Fark.
They're giving away a 40Gig iPod -- better enter the contest before they go under:
http://www.consumer.att.com/callatt/
Okay, fact check time.
1. The old Bell phones were extremely reliable. They were designed with a 20-year lifespan, because if they broke, The Phone Company would have to fix or replace them at no additonal charge. The result was a series of (physically) heavy-duty electromechanical units which could survive six-foot drops, high-voltage electrical transients, and any amount of interference you could dish out.
2. The Bell system overcharged on long distance (which few people, mostly the wealthy) used, so it could subsidize local calls (which everyone uses.) This was not a secret; it was spelled out in all sorts of regulatory paperwork. The result was called "universal service," meaning you could afford local telephone service no matter how poor you were, or how remote your residence was.
3. Bell Labs was very innovative. Possibly the most innovative research organization ever managed by a for-profit corporation. Physics, Computer Science, and Mathematics all owe a huge debt to the Labs. Unix. The transistor. Satellite communications. More patents and Nobel prizes than any other company. All gone, thanks to deregulation and downsizing.
Boy, does that ever sound familiar. See my story ("good riddance to bad rubbish") above. The only difference is that in my case they said the payment had arrive a couple of days late, but the bank's cancelled check image showed that it had been cashed a week before the bill was due.
I wonder why they were so aggressive about turning over accounts paid through online bill paying services to collection agencies?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
no u
lolz