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40 Years After Carterphone Ended AT&T Equipment Monopoly

Posted by timothy on from the decision-rings-true dept.

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."

36 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. we're the phone company by jacquesm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:we're the phone company by FLEB · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why should they waste energy and money running lines out to where people aren't?

      If you want to be out in the sticks, away from where people are (or you want something else that depends upon that fact), deal with the consequences of not being in a dense enough population to warrant higher-level service-- the same way people who want to be more closely connected live with the downsides of being in more urban areas. While I can get behind rolling basic services out to everyone (power, phone, dialup), once you have "access", anything past that is something you have to figure out or deal without.

      --
      Information wants to be free.
      Entertainment wants to be paid.
      You just want to be cheap.
    2. Re:we're the phone company by Yez70 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They should establish basic service for everyone. You or I consider broadband as basic service and we all pay the Universal Service Fee on our bills. That money is meant to provide basic service to everyone, particularly in the rural areas. We paid for those lines to be built and we are still paying to keep them maintained. The phone companies, on the other hand, are doing their absolute best to NOT spend the money as they are supposed to spend it. Instead they quote numbers like it costs us $13,000 per phone line per year to get service to people who live in the woods. I don't know about you, but if I was being given $13 grand a year per household to get people phone service, I'd happily erect a cellular tower to cover 50 people and give them wireless broadband. It's time we abandon wireline service, especially in rural areas and force the telcos to refocus their efforts on updated technologies.

    3. Re:we're the phone company by 54mc · · Score: 5, Funny

      And if you want to eat the bread made from the wheat grown in my fields, you'll run an OC 12 line to my farmhouse.

      --
      Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
    4. Re:we're the phone company by Toll_Free · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I agree 1000 percent with you.

      I am also a subscriber to a wireless broadband company, mostly catering to the Hotel / Hospitality market. They found out that they could make MORE money by providing wifi broadband (802.11 based) to outlying areas in So Calif.

      50.00 a month gets me half megabit bidirectional (another 9.99 a month gets me another few hundredK, QOS'ed for Vonage or my VoIP of choice, an external and internal IP (one for VoIP, one NAT), etc.)). I can pay up to 150 a month to get much faster, but a properly positioned Squid box negates the need for that, and fetchmail keeps me happy on the single POP acct. I have left.

      It's expensive, it's ideal (I haven't lost signal yet, but I HAVE had latency issues when we had 3 feet of snow in 12 hours.... It still worked, just had a few timeouts). Judicious use of access points and parabolics mandated on each installation means we continue to get service. Our ToS is shittily written (as a consumer, instead of a business acct), but honestly, I haven't had much of an issue.

      I back that up with wireless from my cell phone.

      I pay much more than I do at my house in Silicon Valley. I pay 19 dollars a month for 1.5 meg DSL, and we all know the drill there.

      But, for an always on connection, people in the "sticks" should look to Hotels and their ISP's. It helped me out.

      http://www.creative-wireless.net/ is the name of the company that I pay my bill to, but they are NOT the underlying technology. However, at a place that has various peaks and valleys from slightly BELOW sea level to > 7K feet (My house is at 6400 feet ASL), it works GREAT. (I dropped WildBlue satellite when I found these guys).

      --Toll_Free

    5. Re:we're the phone company by Khaed · · Score: 2, Informative

      Then stop giving ISPs money to get broadband to John Boy.

  2. Here's a toast to... by msauve · · Score: 3, Interesting

    500 sets.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  3. Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by LM741N · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by v1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's where I put all the UPS's that people give me that don't work anymore, after I go to rat shack and drop $20 on a new battery for them.

      Most of the equipment in my house has a UPS. My phone, my answering machine, my stereo (keeps the channel presets), my WAP in the attic, etc. Gave one to my neighbor recently, her main phone is a cordless and wasn't working during a recent blackout.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    2. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Most of the equipment in my house has a UPS. My phone, my answering machine, my stereo (keeps the channel presets), my WAP in the attic, etc. [...]

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.

      Rarely have I seen such a topical sig.

      (Me, I use a cell phone; it has its own UPS!)

    3. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by EdIII · · Score: 3, Informative

      I still have a lineman's set in the garage. The cordless phone itself would be quite useless in such a situation. I agree.

      However, cellphone only households are quickly on the rise. I have only used a cell phone since around 2000. Especially since AT&T came out with that unlimited charter plan years back.

      Although I do technically have a phone line with my DSL service I never use it. In fact, the line runs straight from the street to my DSL modem. Just a patch cable in the junction box going straight from the telco box to the specific cat5 run servicing my DSL modem. I rewired the rest of the outlets for RJ45 instead and run Gigabit networking over those cat5 runs.

      If I absolutely had too, I could connect the lineman's set directly to the cat5 coming in from the telco box and make a phone call. I could just as easily sit on my couch in the dark and use my cell phone. Those same huge batteries they use for the telco lines also are used on the cell phone towers.

      So I would say yes, everybody should have an old touch tone phone if they do not already have a cell phone.

      P.S - What about people getting their telephone service through VOIP with their cable company? Batteries won't help in that case and neither would a touch tone telephone. Only a cell phone would provide appropriate fail over.

    4. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by Eil · · Score: 3, Informative

      I could just as easily sit on my couch in the dark and use my cell phone.

      But the cell networks typically fall down and are completely useless during any type of large-scale emergency. Cell phones were completely useless to those ensnared in the Northeast Blackout of 2003 but I never had any problem getting through to people on my land line (until the batteries at the CO ran out anyway). Cell carriers design and maintain their infrastructure under the assumption that only a small percentage of consumers will be using the network at any given time and they don't bother to plan for contingencies. So when something happens that prompts a bunch of people to dial a number and hit Send at once, the whole thing falls down.

    5. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by EdIII · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You and the other poster COMPLETELY missed my point. No offense, but you both came into the middle of a conversation without reading the original posts.

      I was talking with the other gentleman about a regular touch tone phone acting as a fail over communications device during a power outage in your neighborhood. The batteries that supply the power over the telco lines also allow older non-cordless touch tone telephones to operate since they were designed to operate from that power and not the power being used in your house. That voltage is typically 48 volts on the line.

      I also pointed out to him that VOIP operating on cablemodems from your local cable provider are not designed to use the 48V being provided over the telco lines which is backed up by those large batteries.

      So in the event of a power outage in the neighborhood your local cable provider may also have large battery systems providing UPS to their own equipment servicing your house. However, your VOIP equipped cablemodem is not designed to draw power through the coax line from those UPS batteries. You would require your own UPS to provide power to your cablemodem, router, switch, etc.

      So YES you are BOTH CORRECT. Your UPS in your home will allow you to still talk on the phone assuming that your cordless phone, cablemodem, router, switch, etc. are all connected to the UPS. That would also assume that the cable provider has UPS backed up equipment in your neighborhoods.

      However, that still had nothing to do with what I was talking about.

    6. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by Miamicanes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > Why don't batteries work for VOIP from the cable company?

      Because cable companies, unlike phone companies, aren't required to have backup power to run THEMSELVES. Or, as Comcast's reps eloquently put it after Hurricane Wilma, "Our crews follow FPL's." No power == no cable == no cable internet. Hurricane Wilma left my old neighborhood's power lines relatively unscathed, but destroyed our power substation, so we had no power for more than two weeks (Coral Gables... central Dade County). I never lost DSL local loop, but Comcast didn't get service restored to the area until the day after FPL did, and didn't get it restored to pre-hurricane problem-free levels for another week. Anyone with cable internet in the area was SOL unless they had a tetherable PDA phone.

      Sadly, when I moved recently, I was assured by AT&T/BellSouth that DSL is available in my neighborhood... then told that I can't actually GET DSL right now because their DSLAM ports are maxed out (it's a remote DSLAM), and the bastards are too cheap to add more. To say I was pissed would be an understatement... I actually had DSL availability as an explicit contingency on my purchase offer, and was delighted to have it officially satisfied the next day by BellSouth's assurances that DSL exists in my neighborhood (never bothering to mention that "Exists" != "Available to new customers"). So for now, at least, I'm a captive Comcast customer :(

    7. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by EdIII · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I had heard that plenty of cell towers were still active during Katrina for 48+ hours afterwards. I dunno what percentage of cell towers have battery backed up UPS power supplies, but to my knowledge they are pretty common now. I've personally seen a couple of towers here locally, and they all had battery back up for at least 24 hours and one tower had a hook up to a generator.

      Personally, if I ever had a large-scale emergency I would just run down to my data center. It has a very well equipped security force, unlimited diesel fuel contract providing emergency power, redundant internet, redundant air condition, and UPS redundant power circuits to every cage. I'm pretty sure that I would be able to communicate from there. If I couldn't do that, I would think that the emergency might be REALLY big.

    8. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by Toll_Free · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I use Vonage and a UPS to power my Vonage adapter, my WiFi adapter (I get WiFi based Inet), and my WiFi router in the house.

      It will last nearly 12 hours... I "pulled the plug" in a blackout test one day... It pulled slightly more than 11 hours.

      It, too, was one of those UPS's that was a 'gimme' from a friend.

      --Toll_Free

    9. Re:Everyone should have an old touch tone phone by Toll_Free · · Score: 2, Informative

      What you needed to do was provide a bit more information in your original post.

      Your speaking of the phone not getting AC power. Big difference than the REN.

      But, you do bring up a great point. An even better point would be this.

      All (that I know of) telephone (land line based) systems still have to respond to pulse dialing. Screw touch tone, just pulse dial by tapping the on/off hook button X amount of times (x being the number dialed, ie, tap it 4 times to dial a 4, 9 times for a 9, etc).

      10 taps means 0

      Hope this helps. Yes, there was hacking the phone system before touch tones and the Commodore and BOX autodialer :)

      --Toll_Free

  4. Why? by msauve · · Score: 5, Funny

    You don't know how to sign you name?

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  5. From AT&T to at&t (Colbert explains) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Colbert explains how the old AT&T re-grouped/formed.

    (Is it really that bad? All Baby Bells are back together?)

  6. how carter won by trb · · Score: 5, Informative
    If I recall, this is how Carter won that suit. AT&T always claimed that they were concerned that if competitors connected their hardware to the AT&T network that they might damage the network with badly coupled electrical loads, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringer_equivalence_number

    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.

    1. Re:how carter won by Free+the+Cowards · · Score: 4, Informative

      Everybody seems to be confused about what this decision was. This was not the decision that broke up AT&T. This was the decision that allowed people to purchase telephones from companies other than AT&T. Note, not telephone service, juts plain telephones. Before this decision, you had to buy (or more likely, rent) all of your telephone equipment from the phone company.

      As for the rest, what are you smoking? I can get a phone line for under $20/month, and that's 2008 money. Try doing that before the breakup. I can get plans for under $50/month that give me unlimited calling anywhere in the country. Try that before the breakup.

      --
      If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
    2. Re:how carter won by wljones · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The Carterphone case was covered in my college telecommunications course. Dr. Baker made two points not mentioned in Slashdot. First, Tom Carter knew he did not have the resources to fight Ma Bell (AT&T for the nickname challenged). He asked the oil drilling industry for help, and received all he needed. The Carterphone was critical to the drilling business. Second, Dr. Baker stated that AT&T had a history of fighting the wrong lawsuits for the wrong reasons. Had they simply allowed acoustic coupling with no electronic attachment, the Carterphone would have satisfied customer needs, and the attached equipment monopoly would still exist. AT&T fought it, lost heavily, made unwelcome enemies, and left themselves open to the later lawsuit which destroyed their communications monopoly.

  7. Re:It's a good thing... by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
  8. Re:It's a good thing... by jcr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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."
  9. Phone cops by michaelmalak · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I was going to post a link to a YouTube where Johnny Fever jumped behind a sofa to hide from the Phone Cops -- to illustrate to the youngun's how it was once illegal to have personally-owned phones that weren't leased from AT&T. It was to illustrate how society had changed.

    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.

  10. Re:pretty much created ? by Free+the+Cowards · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  11. "Political" Nonsense by fm6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:"Political" Nonsense by fm6 · · Score: 4, Informative

      As I recall, Lucent wasn't called Lucent until AT&T spun it off. And that business wasn't profitable until AT&T got rid of it. People who were competing with AT&T weren't interested in buying hardware from AT&T. At least, that was the reason they gave when they spun it off. Possibly Lucent just needed to get out from under AT&T's inept management.

      Another detail: however much money has been made putting Unix into phone switches is a tiny fraction of what AT&T hoped to make when they were allowed to turn Unix into a commercial product. AT&T spent something like a billion dollars having a company I worked for build 68010-based Unix systems that were designed to compete directly against IBM-compatibles. Never sold a one. Actually, according to one of my sources, they never even tried: their strategy changed and they abandoned the product.

      They must have made some money licensing Unix to companies like Sun and IBM. But not a fraction of what they hoped when they decided to give up being a common carrier.

      Coincidentally, some 15 years later I briefly worked for Microport, which was a major vendor of UnixWare, the pathetic little descendent of AT&T's big plans for Unix (by then owned by SCO). What percentage of UnixWare buyers were telcos? 100%, or something like it.

  12. Why? by msauve · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  13. 1968, eh? by Alien+Being · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://www.tvacres.com/comm_ernestine.htm

  14. AT&T/Bell Labs: the rest of the story by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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/
  15. The monopoly breakup history is very simple... by VValdo · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    -------------------
    This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
  16. Actually no by tkrotchko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  17. Re:It's a good thing... by khallow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  18. "Carterfone", not Carterphone" by 1u3hr · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Headline is "40 Years After Carterphone Ended..."

    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.

  19. Re:It's a good thing... by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.