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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.
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"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?)
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."
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
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.