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40 Years After Carterphone Ended AT&T Equipment Monopoly
fm6 writes "Wednesday was the 40th anniversary of the Carterfone Decision which brought to an end AT&T's monopoly on telephone terminal equipment. Ars Technica has an opinionated but informative backgrounder on this landmark, which pretty much created the telecommunications world as we currently know it."
We don't care. We don't have to...
Now if only they would get rid of all those dial up lines for internet access in rural areas.
It's really amazing that phone companies still don't have mandatory minimal access levels for net access outside major metropolitan areas.
It's getting better, but oh so slow. And in those areas where there is little or no competition 28.8 is still the standard.
MP3 Search Engine
500 sets.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As they work with the telco electricy in case the mains goes out. I've seen the huge batteries they use and I doubt they would discharge quickly. Cordless phones are obviously useless.
You don't know how to sign you name?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Colbert explains how the old AT&T re-grouped/formed.
(Is it really that bad? All Baby Bells are back together?)
It took 40 years for the change in case.
it took till just recently to get VOIP.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Carterphone had a device where the handset sat in the cradle of their device, it worked in a similar manner to the later acoustically coupled modems, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
So there was no electrical connection (coupling) between the Carter device and the phone. The device had a cradle that the handset sat in, coupling the mic and the speaker. The AT&T lawyers said, well, your device is touching our handset. So Carter lifted the handset an inch out of the coupler, and said, is this too close? The AT&T lawyer said yes. So Carter carried his device across the room and said is this too close? The lawyer said no. Then Carter moved closer and closer, and AT&T's defense crumbled.
The breakup was wrong and politically motivated.
Politically motivated perhaps, but it was still the right thing to do. One has only to look at costs before and after the monopoly to realize that AT&T was one more example of a state-granted monopoly that charged its customers far more than they would have paid in a free market.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
An advocate for a monopoly isn't necessarily a communist. Many of them are merely misinformed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But the YouTube link I found on Google says "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation". So now we have Video Cops instead of Phone Cops.
We can't even talk about monopolies of the past due to monopolies of the present.
Yeah, life was so much better back when I was paying $1/minute to call another state. I hate it that I can call countries around the globe for less than 2% of that today.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Your history is a little off. First off, AT&T did step out of line, and repeatedly. RTFA.
Second, AT&T chose to break up. OK, technically, they were being litigated by the anti-trust cops, but they'd managed to drag it out for 8 years. At which time, the White House was inhabited by Ronald Reagan, not exactly a fiend for fighting big business.
But AT&T's management decided that a breakup, if done on their terms, would turn into a bonanza. The anti-trust people wanted them to get out of the hardware business. Instead, they got to keep their hardware business and spin off their local operating companies instead. This voided the 1956 consent decreee (imposed on them by another anti-business radical, Eisenhower) that limited their businesses to "common carrier" stuff. This allowed them to launch a number of initiatives based on all that technology they were now free to apply commercially. A prime example: UNIX.
Alas they never managed to make much money off of UNIX, or any of the other enterprises they started. Technology isn't worth much if you have no business sense.
One more quibble, this time with your definition of "politically motivated". The breakup was driven by justice department civil servants, and actually happened under a pro-business administration. If there was politics involved it was the make the breakup more like the one AT&T wanted.
The technical advances that Bell Labs made could never have been recreated with what was left.
Look at before and after the breakup. Look at how quickly modems got faster and faster. ANd once the telecom industry was deregulated in 1996, high-speed access bloomed, at least in more profitable markets.
The rest of the country needs high-speed access. This can be accomplished by either adding some controls and requiring some level of access or by creating a 'rural telecom company' that operates with subsidies from the federal government.
Maybe one day.
My blog
Clumsy wording, no punch. What was wrong with the one I submitted, "Happy Cartfone Day"? And why do editors have time to change headlines but not the time to make sure submissions actually make sense?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In exchange for getting to use public right-of-way without cost.
If they get to selectively choose who they serve, let them negotiate land rights across all the private property, everywhere they go.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
http://www.tvacres.com/comm_ernestine.htm
Some key implications of the Carterfone decision on Bell Labs were overlooked by this article. As it mentioned, the same consent degree that previously granted AT&T its network monopoly also prevented it from commercializing its other activities. It was largely because of this limitation that a certain operating system developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in those days was not exploited commercially, but was instead openly passed around academia like a joint at a pot party. Only some time after Carterfone, as AT&T started to shake off that consent decree and start commercializing the work of Bell Labs, did it start to exercise its copyrights to that OS, and by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn. In other words: *BSD, Linux, and OS X ironically owe their existence to the pre-Carterfone AT&T monopoly. They probably would not have come into being if that decision had been made earlier, because Unix would have been treated as something to be commercialized (or at least denied to the public) from the beginning.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So I guess we haven't gone that far.
You have only one entity to blame for the lack of choice when it comes to phone services - the government. If AT&T had a monopoly, it was only kept alive by government restrictions on the creation of competing lines. No doubt such legislation was bought and paid for by the company, but only the government is capable of applying the force necessary to keep competition from existing. As long as government manipulation of the economy is possible, so are monopolies capable of being indefinitely sustained.
This is true. But back in Ma Bell's day, if you wanted to get someone's goat, you called them a Communist. I was just kicking it old-school.
You of course already know how a monopoly is broken because it happens so frequently. Y'know, cuz like... it's always in the news that our government breaks monothic companies like Microsoft or Halliburton into pieces to foster competition, create free markets, and promote options for the consumer.
Regardless, here is a handy chart to illustrate how Ma Bell was broken up in '84 and what has happened since. Stephen Colbert broke it down nicely here, although that link has been removed do to copyright claims by Viacom, one of our six global media conglomerates.
Thank goodness you can still watch it in Canada.
Of all the AT&T derivatives... we know Qwest didn't spy on us. So that's one.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Sorry, *no one* can convince me otherwise, ever.
So, facts aren't important to you? Good to know lest anyone were tempted to take you seriously.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Telecommunications under the old AT&T was such a primitive set of technologies that it hadn't changed appreciably from a consumer viewpoint in 80 years.
Yes, it was reliable, yes, the service guy came out when he said he would, but we were paying $20/month plus we paid for each extension, plus we couldn't have our own phone, so we paid $1/month for a 2nd phone. For 20 years. This is in 1960 dollars. That's like paying $100 per month for a phone today.
Oh, and long distance was dollars per minutes, lousy quality. It was so expensive, that you played games with "person to person" long distance when you wanted to let people know you'd arrived. "I'll call and if I ask for 'Thelma', everything is fine, if I ask for 'Louise', it means the car broke down and you should accept the call".
Since the breakup, phone costs went down, the internet was allowed to get started because nobody could charge you $400/month for a modem line. All kinds of innovative devices are available, and now I have fiber to my house. The communications world is infinitely better off from the consumer's viewpoint than it was 20-30 years ago. I mean, it isn't even close. From all your comments, I have to assume that you worked for the old phone company? I can appreciate that it was a great place to work, but it came at a very high cost to society.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
*Your* facts.
Facts are facts, they don't belong to anyone.
not just reading some biased wiki page decades later and pretending to be an expert.
Hey, I lived through that period too, sunshine. You're full of crap.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I just got the news that MetroPCS is pretty much allowing full consumer choice on access devices.
I'm so glad they're building out in my city, because Verizon, at&t and Sprint all pretty much suck because they still charge top dollar for net access on their networks.
Because that's all I want. With the net access I can do the things I need to do.
Sorry, *no one* can convince me otherwise, ever.
Welp. All I can say, is if you can look at the diseased state of the old AT&T monopoly and think it's better than the amazing things that have happened due to that breakup with both the telecommunications industry and the internet, then you are stupid. As they say, you can't fix stupid.
Here's how I see it, my brother has been employed most of his adult life by Spectralink, a company that makes communication systems for workplaces at the building and campus-level. That job and that business only existed because AT&T's monopoly had been taken apart. My family uses cell phones talk to each other any time and any place civilized. The end of the AT&T monopoly (and the corresponding destruction of the state monopolies in Europe) paved the way for this technology to exist. I connect now to the internet through services that wouldn't have existed in an AT&T monopoly. That's the bald truth. AT&T held us back. It along with the rest of the telecommunication industry helps us now.
Maybe you were an employee. All I can say is that it's not fair to impose a monopoly on everyone else just so AT&T employees can be well paid.
"this landmark, which pretty much created the telecommunications world as we currently know it."
telecommunications of the USA don't you mean?
not everyone in the world has to suffer the USAs ridiculous telecom situation.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
TFA (corerctly" has "Wednesday was the 40th anniversary of the Carterfone Decision..."
Well done Timothy. All you had to do was cut and paste, but you had to try to type.
and yet I'm strangely intrigued...
You are right, one state accredited company to do one thing is the best idea comrade, don't let the capitalist regime change your mind.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
Al Gore sues Mcdonalds, because he not only invented the internet, but wifi and "premium coffee" too.
We never had any advances in suburban communities like Canfield, Ohio where I grew up under the Bell System. It was only after the break up in 1984 that we finally moved from a step-by-step switch to a 5ESS with a few calling features! It was only after competition came in on a local basis much later that I can finally get Anonymous Call Rejection (still can't get it from Bell). New pricing models that make sense in the modern era and more features for the consumer resulted from the bell breakup. yes bell labs came through (and still does post 1984) with many breakthrough scientific discoveries, but so do many other organizations and companies. The argument that had there been no monopoly there would not have been these developments is not a logical one.
I remember way back when we were renting our phones, that there was a 3rd yellow wire used to ring the phone, later only 2 wire were needed (red/green). The phone company was able to determine if you had added an illegal phone by measuring the ring current. So whenever I added another phone I would make sure not to connect the yellow ringer wire, or disconnect the ringer somehow. They never found out so it musta have worked. I have always had a phone in every room. At that time Phone Hacking was Real BIG.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The breakup happened because AT&T wanted to get into other businesses (like computing). If it wasn't for the breakup, AT&T would have done what Microsoft did on a much larger scale.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
FTFA: Within a few years of the FCC's Carterfone decision, America had become a motley world of funny receivers, slick switch boxes, and rickety answering machines. More importantly, consumers quickly embraced the "modulate/demodulate" device, otherwise known as the telephone modem.
Really? Because in the world that I've actually lived my life in, "consumers" (meaning the general public, and not just B2B niche markets) didn't even have computers in their homes, much less modems to connect them to the phone network with, until the late 1970s, and it was still a tiny majority of households that were 'online' until the mid-1990s brought us The Internet to replace proprietary services like CompuServe and "a local 15-year-old geek's one-line BBS running on a warez copy of Telegard".
If Ars Technica's thesis is that the Carter[f|ph]one decision changed everything, it's perhaps a bit dishonest to gloss over the fact that it didn't change much until twenty-five years later.
Ars rocks ... a great read for those that wish to be in the KNOW.
... if music be fruit of love, play on
Look at how quickly modems got faster and faster.
Never mind "faster". I'm sure Ma Bell would have given us faster modems eventually, though maybe not as quickly.
But how about "cheaper" and "practical"? My first modem was a 1200 bps thing. I used a dumb terminal, but of course it wasn't long before that was replaced by a computer. For a few hundred bucks, I had a small device that I could easily connect to any phone line and any computer or terminal.
What was the AT&T equivalent? Even though they had already been forced to allow third-party devices to be connected to their system (though you still had to use those silly acoustic couplers) they felt no need to supply their customers with simple modems. Their closest equivalent was a a "data terminal station" with modem, monitor, and keyboard all built into a desk. And the annual lease was several times what my modem cost to buy.
This cluelessness is the main reason we're better off without the "Bell System". They never understood the marketplace. When they were a common carrier they didn't have to, and that was a very bad thing for everybody. After they became a regular commercial company, they still didn't get it, and that was also a bad thing, but only for their stockholders.
Astonishingly, they never did figure things out. They ended up spinning off their businesses one by one, until there was nothing left but the long-distance operation. Finally, they were bought by one of their own spinoffs — mainly for their name. Good riddance.
Post with a name and I might answer you.