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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."
I would argue this point: SBC is already a horrendous company to work with. And have you ever tried to get DSL service without phone service?
Do you really believe this will get better as there are fewer and fewer options?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT&T
I was gonna explain, but then I realized, Wikipedia no doubt has an article.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
I just recently met with some SBC reps last week who are trying to sell my employer a new phone system, and heard the AT&T name change from them. I asked of them now that SBC owns AT&T if they wished that AT&T had retained ownership of Unix, in light of certain events that have transpired over the years. Their answer was "Absolutely!"
Ma Bell brought us the transistor. My guess is the fallout from that single invention drives about 30% of our economy. And let's not forget the development of Unix and C, and the discovery of pulsars. Sure, they were a huge slow bureaucracy, but the research arm changed our lives forever. I'll never forget you, Ma Bell. Unfortunately, the landline phone business is a dinosaur, and will never again support anything like Bell Labs. If you have a cable modem and a cell phone, landline phones are completely optional; there's no chance to reassembel the old Bell monopoly.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Bell Is Back (flash)
sulli
RTFJ.
Looks like the stock market gets to modify Judge Greene's Modified Final Judgement again and again and again.
Well, at least the "new" stock ticker symbol should fit the SBC to a "T."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Lets hope the cops don't come back, because if they saw something during the search worth arresting you for you won't be able to phone home from jail now. The phones in every jail I've been in (thankfully only two, for minor misdemeanors...) do not call out to cell phones. The only folks you can call are good old landlines. This is the only reason I still have my account with Ma Bell, on the outside chance I need to make that dreaded "one phone call".
If anyone's mileage varies here please correct me and provide location of the detention facility.
FYI...
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
These mergers in the telco industry are simply adjustmets to survive. With Muni-Wifi becoming more prevalent and VOIP cellphones coming out there is less and less need for land line telephones. Saying Ma Bell is back may be a little too strong with the amount of competition when it comes to telephone service. Its also starting to look like Internet service may be looking more like a 3 way competition with muni wifi coming to San Francisco, Anaheim, and Philly in the near future. We're actually getting more options as consumers and the telco are merging again as a result.
From "Crazy People":
You may think phone service stinks since deregulation, but don't mess with us, because we're all you've got. In fact, if we fold, you'll have no damn phones. AT&T - we're tired of taking your crap!
A great movie, if you haven't seen it.
I'm amazed you were able to get the phone line physically removed.
I had a house where the previous owners had had phone service ran to a garage apartment. I was remodelling and wanted it removed as its placement on the building was awkward and in my way.
The linemen were working in the alley behind my place and wouldn't remove it without a work order. Fair enough. I called and after almost an hour of being transferred around, I got someone to place a work order to remove the phone line.
Fortunately I was at home when they came as they started to remove my phone service at the house. Stopped them from doing that, but they wouldn't actually remove the service off the garage since the work order didn't specify that.
Tried to get them to come back out and never had any luck. So I pulled the box off of the garage, rolled up the attached cable as well as possible and left it at the base of the telephone pole.
That was three years ago. The phone box and cable are still at the base of the telephone pole.
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!"
You forget, IBM and microsoft is not forced upon you. (ok some might argue that point) but in many places SBC is forced upon you because that is the only choice for Local telephone service and broadband. and in those instances they enjoy abusing the customer because they know you can not go anywhere else. when I lived in northern michigan Verizon was like that (then was called GTE) they did not care one bit about the customer because what were you going to do there was no competition and oh gee cellular is useless here.
when they own and control the wires on the poles going to homes is when they enjoy screwing customers with inflated rates and poor service.
the moral of the sotry is that only fools trust a large corperation, bigger fools trust a monopoly.
And Yes, a single company can dominate a region easily. there is a reason that some of those towns do not have any competition, it's written in the franchise agreement.
Legal Monopolies brough to you by the corruption we all call local government.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The problem with Big Telecom is that in general they don't seem to have a friggin' clue about customer service. They accept the status quo (crappy support, customers get bounced from dept to dept on the phone, arcane billing) and we all do to, because in many geographic regions there is still simply not enough choice. A market split between two of these lumbering giants isn't a truly competitive environment.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Which carrier was it and where did you hear about this?
For landline or cells? For cells it was widely reported that they had serious issues during the blackout. The few tower sites with backup power were buried because of the traffic caused by the other sites going offline.
For landline my experiences were all local. I would assume that in larger cities they already have generators at the central offices. Around these parts (upstate NY) in a lot of the smaller villages and towns all they have is battery backup. The point that I was making was that they called crews in and deployed generators to those locations before the battery backup failed. The Blackout caused zero interruption of POTS service in almost all cases.
Contrast that with the cellular providers. I'd quote some Nextel PHB from the article I linked, "We need electricity to power our cell sites, but when you don't have that, it's out of our control" I guess Nextel has never heard of a generator.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
From TFA you posted it looks like they are saying since the blackout exceeded 6 hours they were not able to keep the sites up. I'm positive they don't have the staff or the equipment to get a generator to every cell site. So they are a long way from "replacing" land lines if you ask me. I know most of the wireless providers have one or two COWs (cell on wheels) in the case of a single site going down but still not enough of these to make a difference. Also I guess some sites stayed up but ran out of channels since cals would get through every so often.
Difference with landlines is the power comes from the CO (obviously you knew that). You can put a huge generator at the CO and everyone is set since phone is at +5Vdc and only gets up to +30Vdc while it's ringing IIRC. So it's a lot easier for them I guess.
Interesting stuff, sorry for OT I just got curious........
I still use a StarTac they can only triangulate me when i make a call.. i keep having to fix the phone (replace the screen the wireing harnes) but it works.. funny thing is that if i disconnect it or switch services it is aginst the law for them to reactivate the phone because it doens't support "E911" which is where the phone can transmit it's location when you place a 911 call.. yea.. orginaly i was keeping the startac becuse i like it and i had all the damn stuff for it already.. but i think i will keep it for ever or atleast until the government makes it agisnt the law for them to take my money if i use it.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
American Bell.
They actually started using it on internal product before the name was shot down. I think I have a piece buried somewhere in my basement.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Sure we would. They would be able to charge more for use of fiber lines than copper. That would be where that company would increase it's income by investing in it's infrastructure...which would be all that company was ever allowed to own and operate in.
The point I'm trying to make here is that by allowing a company to control both infrastructure and offer services, they can use that position to unfairly leverage the competition into a no-profit situation or higher prices which of course makes theirs "look" better. Trust me, I'm in ISP and I've been dealing with this crap from SBC for well over 6 years now. They always kept the price point just out of our reach of being able to compete on a level price structure. Granted, that usually makes our service better since we have to justify the cost.
Think of it like this. Microsoft being allowed to write other software that works on their OS probably shouldn't be allowed either. Think about all the times MS has used that OS monopoly to their advantage. Intentionally writting updates that breaks other software functionality such as WordPerfect. There's really no difference, it's just a different arena.
Working contract at AT&T Computer Systems in NJ '87-'90, they re-used the American Bell badge blanks they'd pre-ordered for the name change. The Name That Must Not Be Spoken was whited over with the authorized building codes.
The CLEC i used to work at tests its generators every Monday morning for about an hour. It's noisy as HELL. Sounds like a jet engine.
I don't like the thought of cell towers going out during an extended blackout, but I can see why they don't have generators. Not only is there the noise issue but there are also space issues in some cases, plus the fact that generally one company owns the tower and others lease space, and I imagine the landlords are not keen on the idea of having to maintain and administer a shared generator system for every tower.
There might just be a market here for someone with a lot of time and money...setting up central backup power centers and hooking cell towers up to a backup power grid. You'd have to deal with a lot of red tape and probably a lot of crap from the local power companies though.
Back in 1996, at my first ISP job, we had a bank of 30 actual physical modems hooked up to 30 POTS lines over a 300 pair cable into the owner's basement (ahh, those were the days!) One day all of a sudden 3/4 of the modem bank suddenly disconnected. On a hunch we walked one block over to the subdivision's junction box, and sure enough someone had backhoed the underground cable to that box. There was a poor Ameritech employee sitting there with a massive bundle of broken 600-pair cable on his lap with a soldering iron and some of those little crimp-on splicers. My boss took some digital photos of it...I should check and see if he still has them.
Don't knock the drunk drivers. One of them took out the big brown box down the road from me, and as a result I was finally able to get DSL.
Nice. When the drunk driver hit the telephone pole out by my house the Verizon guys decided to hook us up to a different loop (we live on a corner at the bottom of a hill). As a result my DSL distance went from 16,000 to 12,500 feet. It made absolutely no difference in the performance of the DSL but it was amusing all the same.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Alexander Graham Bell and the invented the telephone.
He and several partners formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.
Management from Bell Telephone Company started another independent company called AT&T Long Lines.
In 1899 AT&T bought American Bell Telephone Company (formerly Bell Telephone Company )
In 1974 the Department of Justice broke up AT&T into the many 'Baby Bells' that are now rejoining.
That's where the "Bell" came from. As far as the "Ma" part...
According to bellsystemmemorial.com:
Where did the phrase, "Ma Bell" originate as a slang name for the Bell System or AT&T? Well, nobody seems to know for sure, but here are some possibilities submitted by members of the ATCA and TCI clubs:
"One apocryphal version is that employees of the Bell System acquired an umbilical cord effect. That is why there are very few people who ever quit the Bell System, and so many of the employees who stayed for the duration." - submitted by A. P. Bloom
"Another version is that the stock of AT&T (symbol 'T' on the New York Stock Exchange) was purchased by or for widows and orphans as a long-term investment, since its reputation for reliabilty during recessions was its selling point." - submitted by A. P. Bloom
"I worked for 'Ma Bell' for 34 yrs. Many, many years ago I was told that the term 'Ma Bell' came from a corruption of Alex Bell's wife's name, Mabel, which is pronounced May Belle, and that the company was run as a family business. The first employees were treated very well and thus referred to the company in a friendly way as Ma Bell. I also read that at the 109 Court Street, Boston location (where Bell and Watson did their earliest work on the phone in the 1870's) there was no division of labor. No us against them, managment vs labor division. Every employee was treated as an equal and listened to for ideas. A family atmosphere, thus the term "Ma Bell". True or not? I really don't know."
"When I got married in 1971 I was given one more day of vacation (for the honeymoon) than I was due. When I went to my foreman "Pop" to straighten out the mistake, I told him there was a mistake and I wasn't due the extra day. 'Pop' put his arm around my shoulder and took me aside and told me, 'the same thing happened to me when I got married; you are now part of the family and will be treated as part of the family. The flip side of the coin is that when you go out and do telephone work, you will do it like it's the family business'. I worked that way for many years. Poor craftsmanship was simply not tolerated. Your biggest critics were not the customer or your foreman, it was your coworkers. I remember several times in the 1970's being told, 'the greatest asset of our company is the goodwill of the employees'. I never heard that said again after the breakup of the company on Jan 1, 1984. If it is a family now, it certainly is a disfunctional family!" - Retired and enjoying it, Walter Smith
One might note that these did not include the sale of AT&T's radio franchise to RCA (prior to 1956) or the sale of its motion picture franchise also prior to 1956.
Imagine a company stretching from NEC to Nortel, from Lucent Technologies to half of the stuff Warner Brothers is in today. That is the giant that AT&T was before the first antitrust suit (filed in 1949).
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