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Ma Bell is Back
brass1 writes Ma Bell is back. It seems that for the purposes of branding, SBC is changing its name to AT&T once the acquisition is complete. Meanwhile, a great force and a high pitched whining sound has been reported from Judge Greene's grave as he spins at nearly 10K RPM."
"Ma Bell" is a nickname for AT&T... like "Mother Bell" because it split into severl smaller "Baby Bells"...
Last week the police came to my home and demanded immediate entry (they said they didn't need a warrant for "a case like this") to search for anyone in need of help that may have called. Our telephones were completely out of order (no dial tone) at the time the police say the call came in, and I was sitting peacefully having my second cup of coffee for the morning. After I realized that the telephone company had somehow mis-connected my wife's telephone to the 911 emergency number while the telephones were out of order and repairmen were out working on the lines because of the recent thunderstorms, I had my telephone service discontinued and the wires physically removed from my home.
I suggest that if there is anyone who does not want the police to come to your door at their whim claiming to have received an emergency call and demanding to come in and do a warrantless search, that you also have your telephone lines disconnected. My wife and I now have an excellent cellular telephone plan now that's actually cheaper than what we were paying to SBC.
Ron Dotson
Glendale, CA, USA
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
AT&T's Bell System (aka Ma Bell) was the large telephone system that served the US until the 1980s.
It was ruled an illegal monopoly and broken up into many smaller regional companies (the so-called "Baby Bells"). SBC was one of the baby bells.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
I can attest to this. SBC majorly sucks on toast. Just initiating for them to turn on the telephone service for the first time(translation: click "OK" at the call center) costs $50.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Here's some fantastic diagrams that describe the history of telecom. See pages 9 through 12 on this powerpoint slide from MIT. The AT&T breakup made things kind of complicated, the 1996 Telecom Act made them even more complicated, but has allowed everything to go back to a pre-breakup configuration.
Actually, this one is a little better.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Alexander Graham Bell -> American Bell -> American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) + Western Electric -> Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs).
Bell Labs did everything first: telephones, lasers, telecommunications satellites, electronic and packet switching, UNIX, etc.
In 1949 Bell Labs was sued for antitrust. They settled in 1956 with the US DOJ. Part of the settlement is that Bell Laboratories couldn't use one monopoly (telephone) to gain others. In 1974 they got another antitrust suit which was to be split up in 1984.
Prior to 1984, there was one telephone company. The bell. Mother bell. Ma Bell. Whatever you like. It was so huge and spanned so many products and etc, that many people didn't know where one part began and another ended. They kept telephone and data circuit prices real high, so the DOJ's decision to make a bunch of little bells (baby bells) was to make it easier for others to compete and hopefully bring the prices down.
It didn't work.
No apologies were proffered by the police. The exact same thing happened to me back in January with the local fire department incidentally.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
"We're the phone company. We don't care, we don't have to." is a famous tag-line from comedianne Lilly Tomlin from the old "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" TV show. She played a phone operator (Ernestine) with a plugboard and did things like calling Richard Nixon's White House and asking "Why do you have 162 extension phones?...Well, if they're so silent, why do you need 162 phones?".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Western Electric made telephones you could drive nails with. Most of the phones you get today would break if you dropped them only once, phone cable dialectric craps out after a few months. Stuff that was built to hold up for decades will probably still be around when the cockroaches are all that's left roaming the earth.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They're right--they do NOT need a warrant in such a case. What if, say, a wife called 911 after being beaten, locked her away, and the husband refused to allow a search when they got there? Warrants are only there to show that they have a "reasonable suspicion"--if they have it for some other reason, like the 911 call (or it being "in plain sight"--a category that is always problematic), they don't need a warrant. IANAL, but I did read up a bit on this at one time.
I'd attribute this to incompetance instead of malice in this case--after all, you mention them misconnecting the lines. If someone swapped a couple lines and your neighbor called 911, it could hose their system for determining who called.
Oh, and if they really had used this as a mere pretext, and uncovered evidence of you doing something illegal, the 4th Ammendment provides for the supression of the illegaly obtained evidence. So they cannot use it against you in a court of law if you prevail on that point--they don't even get to show it to the jury. It's so contemplated specifically to frustrate such efforts to perform illegal searches. But if you have to argue over that, you do want a good lawyer--4th Ammendment case law is incredibly complex.
SBC merged with two other baby Bells: Pacific Bell in 1997, and Ameritech in 1999.
> now that the former holder of the name gave it up for the trendy 90's marketroid name of "Lucent"?
If things keep going the same for Lucent, they might not be needing that name any longer, either.
From today's New York Times:
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
> virtually every single cell tower went down during the Northeast Blackout
True, but there's a lot more cell towers than CO's! Also, the phone company can get away with noisy generators much easier than a cellphone company. They always use the excuse of needing to provide 911 service when breaking noise laws, other laws, or when stealing property. Land-line service is viewed as a necessity and cellphones as a luxury. For our towers in the city limits of several cities, we're not allowed to use generators. Hell$outh has huge generator trucks that they bring in several times a year when the power is out. They can get away with it.
The officer who claimed they didn't need a warrant was either grossly mistaken or lying through his teeth. Either one is indicative of the gradual failure of rights protection in the US.
Google "exigent circumstances".
HAND.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Sorry to bear bad news, but most of AT&T Labs has been outsourced to IBM as of last May.
IBM is actively trying to move as much of that work as possible to India, and they are overt about this. It's discussed openly in director-level all-hands meetings.
I used to work for Labs, and became an IBM employee with the outsourcing, and then found myself reporting to someone with the @in.ibm.com address.
Then the people who knew WHY we did our jobs kept leaving, and getting replaced by people who only knew how to populate status reports and timesheet codes.
Then I quit and got a job in the Energy sector instead.
AT&T Labs is essentially gone, and will never be reformed in the SBC/AT&T merged company.
POTS = Plain Old Telephone System (really) In other words, the landlines and switches that make up basic non-cellular phone service in the country.
I would suggest some of Strong Bad's Rhythm 'n' Grammar. Highly educational.
No, it's a line from her SNL appearance. She never said it on Laugh-In.
h tml
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.p
The latest Slashdot meme.
As a matter of fact, they are.
The BBC hasn't been broken up (yet) ;)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In the beginning was Ma Bell, and things were regular.
Then did Judge Greene divide, and there was AT&T and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies: NyNex, Bell Atlantic, Bellsouth, Ameritech, US West, Southwest Bell and Pacific Telesis.
Nynex & Bell Atlantic -> Verizon
Southwest Bell & Ameritech & Pacific Telesis (and SNET) -> SBC
US West -> acquired by Qwest during the dot-boom
Seven RBOCs down to four, three of them owning a LD carrier or trying to: Qwest already a carrier, Verizon buying MCI, SBC buying AT&T. Bellsouth's the poor sister at this point. What ever happened to Sprint's LD business?
In Britain, BT was given an effective monopoly on landline telephone service in 1984. At around the same time, the UK government set up two cellular franchises, and while it allowed BT to be involved with owning one of the operators, it actually insisted that BT own a minority share (Cellnet, for it is them, was majority owned by a company largely known for delivering parcels and money.)
In the early nineties, as this wasn't creating enough competition, they opened up three more franchises (though two franchisees merged early on), and the EU itself forced the UK to open up more (albeit resulting in only one more competitor) a few years ago for 3G services.
I can't imagine it being any different in the US. The AMPS network supported B and A carriers from the start. Would the FCC not have opened up the 1900MHz band in the mid-nineties?
Not that I think the break-up of AT&T did nothing. But the notion that AT&T having a regulated monopoly would have meant it would have controlled cellular too strikes me as unlikely. The only change I can possibly think of is that it's possible that the calling-party-pays scheme would have been more feasable in an environment in which one landline operator exists who sets the charges for every type of call. And, having lived under both regimes, I can't honestly tell you if that'd have been better or worse.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
And thanks to the magic of Inflation, the cost is about the same, despite the price change.
:-)
You're saying that thanks to inflation 2 cents today is worth the same as 10 cents in the 80s? I think you'd better go brush up on your economics.
Laugh at stupidity: mod idiots +1 Funny.
Go ahead and mock the Bell System. They did step over the line quite a few times.
I think that the conspiracy between J.P. Morgan and Theodore Vail was more than a bit over the line. Note that Ma Bell didn't become a monopoly without a lot of "help" from the good friend of Vail's. Basically Morgan would withhold credit, the competitor would go belly up, and AT&T would buy it for pennies on the dollar. This is how they went from about 60% market share in 1900 to a near total monopoly 50 years later. Tragically Congress intervened on AT&T's behalf, effectively exempting telephony from the Sherman Act.
It was only though the hard work of the folks at the FCC and NASA that we have any competition in the telphone market today. (FCC because of their tireless work to ensure that customers could purchase their own telephone equipment, and NASA for jumpstarting Comsat Corp. The FCC also made it a policy of subjecting AT&T to much more regulatory scrutiny than their competitors, such as Microwave Communication Inc, later named MCI.)
The early AT&T made Microsoft look like a good corporate citizen. And they only got away with what they did because first Congress rolled over and exempted them from an important antitrust act, and secondly, that two major wars (WWII, Korea) disrupted investigation and enforcement on remaining grounds. But the break up was the result of seventy-four years of repeated predatory activity on the part of AT&T, investigations by the ICC (later FCC), and government policy aimed at curtailing AT&T's power. Note that the ICC's first investigation into antitrust violations started in 1910 and that it took two antitrust cases (both settled out of court) to break the company up.
At its height, the Bell system included AT&T, Western Union, Western Electric, Bell Labs, and all the regional bell operating companies. They had their own radio network and were even attempting to get in on producing motion pictures prior to the consent decree of 1956.
For many years, you could be heavily penalized for putting a piece of cellophane tape on your telephone. No consumer purchased equipment. No acustic fibers that would effectively mute the device, nothing. In essence your telephone was the equivalent of closed source software today. It was licensed to you. You could not dissassemble it. You could not extend it. You could not purchase another one and swap parts. You could not even purchase another one and connect it to the Bell network. And if you did, they would sense the impedance differences and disconnect your service.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
i was able to get them to come out to my apartment for a DSL install, but :
1. it took three appointments of letting them in to check the junction box to see that i *could* get DSL (two appointments they missed and the third they showed up half hour late for their 2-4 hour window)
2. the tech who showed up to do the install was clearly unfamiliar with a PC beyond the little icon that starts up freecell
3. they removed my existing ISP setup during the install (this is important, because they ultimately failed to install the new service)
4. they removed every icon from my quickstart group (because he wanted it to reboot faster while he was installing)
5. he never got it to work, but suggested that i ask someone from work to help, but couldn't leave any of the equipment like the modem because it wasn't a finished install
6. they still proceeded to bill me for service even though it never got installed!
anyone that's lived in one of their markets can tell you that SBC is incredibly inept, yet somehow they keep growing and taking over new markets. are the other carriers that much worse?
Really? Many people like to claim that the breakup of AT&T meant nothing. But I have to ask. "Do you have a cell phone?"
People miss the point. The AT&T divestiture was offered in exchange for allowing divisions of AT&T to monetize products they were not otherwise allowed to sell. Independant wireless phone providers (ala the Carterphone) were encouraged by the FCC, as were alternate long distance circuits (Microwave Communications, Inc-- guess what company they are today
The idea was that if AT&T stopped coordinating between the local bell operating companies and the long distance service, that it would allow for more competition on long distance lines. That part worked. But it was not the only part of the plan. In reality it was a part of a long and concerted effort on the part of the federal gov't to weaken AT&T. Portions of this included the FCC registering protective circuits on telephone equipment so that AT&T had no legal grounds for excluding them, NASA refusing to give AT&T exclusive rights to microwave communication via satellites and instead forming Comsat Corp (1/2 owned by telecom industry, 1/2 owned by private investors, with AT&T barred from owning more than about 25%), and more.
Don't forget that the breakup was mutually agreed upon. And that it formed the final piece of the puzzle regarding competition for long-distance networks.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
(Decades later, this entity would be spun off and renamed "Lucent Technologies.")
Um no, BBN did packet switching first by building the Interface Message Processor. AT&T said it could not be done.
That quote is taken out of context so many times it's not even funny. What AT&T said couldn't be done was replacing the analog infrastructure with the digital one required for packet switching.
There are no digital circuits in my town, so I'd say that packet switching still hasn't replaced the analog infrastructure.
I'd never say that it won't happen, some day, but this quote occurred back in 1965 over 15 years after AT&T started experimenting with packet switched networks.
Yes, the POTS lines stayed up. If you had any clue how the POTS systems or cell systems worked, you would realize how silly that argument was. In a nutshell (I'm good at nutshells, people tell me I'm nuttier than a squirrel turd.) The POTS line in your house is run from a CO (Central Office) with usually one big telephone switch, which is easy to have one big battery bank (usually there is one set of batteries in each cabinet to prevent any one cabinet from failing). In the event of a catastrophic power failure (loss of grid power) the internal cabinet batteries keep a tone on the line until the building backup generator gets warmed up and provide an external source of power. Everything is centrally located, easy to maintain, and in most cases, the generator never comes on because the cabinets will power themselves for at least an hour before they start dropping out. Now, when you lose the grid, imagine having to try to maintain the same scenario in 20 locations. Each tower must have a battery back system (which requires routine maintenance), and a generator in the event of a longer outage (more routine maintenance) plus if the tower is on a building, you have the problem of the landlord letting you store large banks of potentially explosive batteries, a generator, a large tank of explosive fuel. Also, the generators have to be fired every so often to make sure they don't have a problem, plus storage of fuel for said generators has to be stabilized, or rotated so you don't have "bad gas" in your backup system that would take it down. Now, you've spent millions of dollars in getting your towers on a reliable source of power. You now have the problem of providing a SECOND source of power for the incoming line from the CO. Being a multi trunked line, it isn't powered by the CO's emergency power like your POTS line is. You must supply 24-96 volts and it might be a proprietary -48Vdc system. So you are looking at even more things to fail. It's not quite as simple as plugging an APC UPS into your home computer, and as soon as you do all of this, the power goes out, your battery bank explodes because of a bad cell (happened to our local PD on the last power outage drill) and the site goes down anyway. Now you have to answer to your customers who want to sue you because they couldn't call 911 on their cell phones. Ok, a little more than a nutshell, but still not too in depth.
...because what good is power unless you can abuse it?
The big flaw in that strategy was that they didn't know how to be a commercial company. Every venture of theirs collapse because of bureaucratic nonsense and bad planning. I worked for the company that built Unix PC for them (basically, one of our 68010 time-sharing boxes clumsily mated with some of their telecom hardware plus an ineptly designed keyboard and display). AT&T spent something like a billion dollars developing this product and paying for initial production — and never even tried to sell it. By the time it reached the market, they decided that they were going to to IBM-compatibles instead. Which made a certain amount of sense — except that product line didn't sell either.
How many different ways did they screw up? Let's see, "phone stores", the TCI buyout...
Ma Bell didn't bring us the transistor. The transistor was around for years before Bell Labs invented the SILICON transistor.
The original transistor was invented by a guy from Europe; and he had a patent on it from before 1930, IIRC.
The Silicon transistor wasn't developed in a vacume (pardon the pun). It was a natural extension of an existing device, one which was rather useful.
Please, give proper credit where it is due. Doing otherwise is an insult to the people who brought us some rather useful results, that we've built from since. Thank you.