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."

Comments

Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo

[kflash15]

"Ma Bell" is a nickname for AT&T... like "Mother Bell" because it split into severl smaller "Baby Bells"...

Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Actually, this one is a little better.

Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION

[mrsbrisby]

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.

Re:service mark

[$RANDOMLUSER]

HELLO?? MODS?? PLEASE TRY TO KEEP UP.

"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?".

SBC used to be called Southwestern Bell

[dananderson]

SBC was originally called Southwestern Bell. It covered the Southwest United States (except for California and Nevada). It was one of the regional "baby Bells" created when ATT was split in the 1980s.

SBC merged with two other baby Bells: Pacific Bell in 1997, and Ameritech in 1999.

Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo

[squiggleslash]

A similar "friendly nickname" is given to the BBC which is frequently refered to (unfortunately, probably more often by itself) as "Auntie Beeb", for much the same reason.

The BBC hasn't been broken up (yet) ;)

Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION

[squiggleslash]

Any scenario I could imagine where AT&T was the only phone company providing cell service doesn't look good at all.

But it wouldn't have been. In most Western free-market countries, cellular service was deliberately un-monopolised. The dominant landline operator was usually given a franchise together with a competitor, because there's no reason why cellular should be a natural monopoly. It's cheap to deploy, a substantial proportion of the costs are per-customer (as opposed to landline service where it's more per-street)

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.