Slashdot Mirror
Ma Bell Stifled Innovation, AT&T May Do the Same
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T recently announced it plans to acquire T-Mobile to create the largest wireless network in the US. If the deal is allowed to complete, it will create only three major players in the industry with Verizon being a close second and Sprint being a distant third. Sprint, along with consumer rights groups, have already cried foul. They argue that AT&T's proposed acquisition will stifle competition and innovation."
Ever heard of "Bell Labs"?
That it's even an open question shows how far from actual trustbusting we have gone.
Even as a libertarian, I see this, just as all democracies (as opposed to republics) devolve, so does uncheck capitalism - always in the direction of corporate socialism (rent-seeking, bailouts, etc.)
Stuff never broke, you knew that your neighbor wasn't getting a better deal, and you didn't have to worry about sevrice or dropped calls; ma bells team of engineers and workers kept stuff running smoothly
And, as anyone who travels abroad knows, the supposed "benefits" of competition don't seem so good: in those awful socialist countrys like france, they have, and have had for many years, superior telecoms.
Of course, when the CEO of Verizon makes 18 or 20 million dollars a year, he has an incentive to hire (on Verizon's nickel) economists and journalists to tell the world how great competition and the unbridled capitlism are...
In Canada you have a lot more choice in providers, most of the American companies are available as well as Rogers and Bell, i guess it's just better, like our healthcare...
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
Whats there to be argue. if there is a SINGLE provider monopoly in a nation, more than innovation is stifled. Not even right wing economists argue against that anymore.
Read radical news here
Just less of the technical sort, and more of the "how can we take your money" sort.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
i remember the days when we had a dozen cell carriers in the US. expensive service, crappy reception almost everywhere you went. as the competition dried up we've had prices drop and better phones come out. 10 years ago when i got my first cell phone in the US i paid $40 a month for 450 minutes. these days the same $40 buys you 450 minutes but the night/weekend minutes and anyone on the same carrier is free minutes. and with some plans you can call any mobile number and not use up your minutess
and 10 years ago i had to buy my phone for $200. these days i can get a "free" smartphone when signing up for a contract. only thing that changed was that the contracts went to 2 years
I am an AT&T Wireless customer as they have good coverage in my area. Mobile to mobile and roll over keep me "loyal." I was initially against this merger, however I read some articles that changed my mind. First T-Mobile has no 4G Spectrum. All the 4G spectrum was sold to Verizon, Sprint and AT&T who acquired theirs from Nextel. The monopoly is created by the spectrum requirements, not the companies themselves. The government messed this up and T-mobile has no opportunity to continue competing.
It makes no sense for Sprint or Verizon to buy T-mobile as the technologies are incompatible. AT&T on the other hands needs more towers and they take time to approve. Acquiring them from T-mobile will speed up the deployment of more radios.
If you want true competition, the government needs to stop selling the spectrum, and instead pay for the infrastructure and let the companies all provide competing services over the same infrastructure. It does not make sense to force T-mobile to compete in a 4G world with 3G service.
... if this deal goes through, I'll probably switch to Verizon whenever my current phone is obsoleted or dies.
All companies are evil, but AT&T has a track record of having really crappy Android handsets while T-Mobile has a track record of having the best.
T-Mobile is the only provider that I've found in the USA that does not truncate the high bit on text messages. I can send text messages in Chinese and Japanese with my unlocked iPhone on T-Mobile. AT&T and Sprint clip the high bit. I hope AT&T won't screw up T-Mobile's network.
That it's even an open question shows how far from actual trustbusting we have gone.
Maybe the problem is too much trustmaking (restricted licensing, monopoly granting, etc.)
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Please dont invent terms out of your ass. Corporatism has no relevance with socialism and it cannot be merged with the the other term.
you americans tend to invent a lot of misplaced, incorrect termage in your own jargon and try to sell it to entire world. in this case, some half assed, INCORRECT and irrelevant 'term' invented by some americans, in the name of 'corporate socialism'.
really ?
socialism, is owning of means of production AND the profits, equally by the PEOPLE participating in the system.
how much does the employees of at&t own at&t ? or, does its majority share rest in the hands of a handful of people, AND, the rest in the hands of some hundred thousand wealthy people, a minority being distributed among the random shareholder ?
do at&t employees join in decision making process of at&t democratically, and does the corporation guarantee their livelihood, their healthcare, their kids' education, their rent, their entertainment expenses, and their own education ?
this is what socialism is.
you people are appending the word socialism to something else because word 'socialism' is a scare word in us political jargon. while rest of the world knows the term for its real meaning.
you dont even take the time to check what you are saying, and see whether you are coining a term right or wrong, even at the wake of blatant incorrectness.
there is NOTHING called "corporate socialism" its an american invented scare word, designed to scare people away from corporate greed. and it is INCORRECT
the term you looking for, was corporate fascism.
Read radical news here
>> i remember the days when we had a dozen cell carriers in the US. expensive service, crappy reception almost everywhere you went. as the competition dried up we've had prices drop and better phones come out.
My first computer ran Doom like a slide show and cost $3,000. I bought an iPod Video for $40 recently, with hacked firmware it runs Doom smoothly. This is the result of technology progressing, not with removal of competition.
I had Comcast cable internet for around 5 years because there was nothing else but even worse DSL in my area. They gave me 50kbytes/s upload and 750kbyte/s download. 2 months before Verizon installed FiOS lines in my area the upload jumped to 200kbyte/s and the download to 1.5mbyte/s.
Hotmail gave you 10mb disk space for eons. Gmail came out then Yahoo and Microsoft had to change.
As long as there is competition, even if it's just 2 mega-corps battling it out, companies can not sit still and must continue to innovate/advance.
Cry me a river. The wireless world ain't the wired world. Much lower barriers to competition, much more room for technical innovation, must faster pace. Let one big wireless company run amok, and it won't be long before it's gone on its own. Let the government into the living room, however, and you won't be able to get them out with a crowbar. I mean, it's government's fault in the first place, lest we forget. If spectrum were largely unregulated the market would have already solved that problem with technology, and we'd likely have 20 players instead of 3.
Yes, it seems that the old AT&T is back. Instead of spending the billions they're putting up for T-Mobile in network improvements, they're just going to buy out the competition. AT&T's Wireless Network sucks, their wired service sucks (I deal with their business units all the time) and it's not like you have a lot of choice out there.
I'm sorry, but I remember having to spend $800/month for a 300 Baud Modem back in the 70s. You could only get it from AT&T and you could only lease it. For those who don't remember what those days are like, just give us a few more years and it will be back but this time Wireless will be in the hands of two carriers in this country, Verizon and AT&T and having been customers of the "New AT&T ala the SBC bought out AT&T" and Verizon I can tell you we're all fucked.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The Myth of Natural Monopoly p.56-57
Unnatural Monopoly: Critical Moments In The Development Of The Bell System Monopoly
the more your kind keeps silent, the more the other kind, fooled ignorant masses, speak up. and the ones herding them get encouraged and bolder.
Read radical news here
The article claims that Bell stifled innovation by choosing not to bring an invention made by a company employee to market, in this case magnetic tape audio recording. That's such an overblown reading of the event that it's laughable. Companies create ideas all the time they decide not to productize because they're not really in their core business, because they fear (rightly or wrongly) that they'll will have a negative impact on that core business. In this case it was both.
In any case, magnetic audio tape was invented in Germany in the prior decade, and magnetic wire recording technology had existed since the 1890s and was widely commercialized in the 1920s.
On the other hand, in Ma Bell's tenure we had the development of Unix, computer networking, and satellite telephony, in which the company paid key roles. The break-up of the Bell System was motivated in part by the hypothesis that competition would bring new technologies like digital telephony (in this case ISDN) to market faster. While nobody can say what would have happened without the break up, on that goal at least the break up could not be called a success.
The result of the break-up wasn't rapid technological innovation; it was price competition. That was a good thing. By in large the AT&T monopoly worked very well, within the expected limitations of any such regulated monopoly. We had *excellent* telephone service for the era, but it was much more expensive than it might have been. Under the covers it was quite technologically advanced. Ma Bell designed the multiplexed digital transmission system (the T Carrier system) that is still used in North America today back in the 1950s, and did early deployments as early as 1961. The commercial adoption of the Internet occurred a decade after the break up of the Bell System in 1984, but it was based on the T Carrier system and its refinements, all designed and implemented by the Bell system in the 60s and 70s, *before* the break-up.
Which is not to say that monopolies are necessarily a good thing. It was good that the break up lowered long distance prices. Nor are such monopolies always technical successes (BT comes to mind). It is even possible that the columnist is right, and that the Bell System *did* somehow stifle innovation, despite the historical fact of all the innovations it brought to market as a monopoly. The problem is his argument, which is pure, ignorant BS.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They don't have a monopoly yet and are imposing these for the sole purpose of stifling online video providers versus their "Multiverse".
but Ma Bell did a HELL OF A LOT of innovating. All thjose service you take for granted? pretty much invented by Me Bell.
Call forwarding - yep.
Call waiting - yep
Central voice mail - yep
star 69 - yep
answering machine - yep
magnetic storage tape - yep
insulated telephone wires - yep
and I could go on and on.
Ma Bell also gave it's Scientist a ton of freedom to innovate.
Ma Bells problem was in customer service. If they had spent more money in getting rid of the multi hour lines, and creating good call in phone service they would still be around.
Of course the new AT&T his stating to show all those problems and very little innovation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Read somewhere that it was the iPhone tie-in with AT&T that sounded the death knell for T-Mobile in the States. Their contract sales went down the toilet after the thing was launched....
I have been with T-Mobile for a few years now and I oppose this merger because of the following reasons.
1. T-Mobile is the #1 carrier in customer service and AT&Terrible (who I left to go to T-Mobile) sucks at customer service.
2. T-Mobile doesn't throttle their data plans like AT&T and they allow Tethering and make no attempt to block it unlike AT&T
3. T-Mobile has some of the most competitive pricing I have an unlimited everything plan that T-Mobile just started offering and I only pay 99.00 a month with that said I agree with the stifle competition statement because AT&T doesn't offer anything even comparable to the plan I am on. The next closest is Sprint but their unlimited only includes mobile to mobile no lanlines.
So, in my opinion AT&T can go f*&^ theirselves and if they do end up getting their way with this merger I will be going straight to Sprint and I assure AT&T that most T-Mobile customers will most likely be leaving as well because T-Mobile customers are used to being treated like people and not like customer numbers like AT&T treats thier customers.
I don't think that's a fair comparison to make. The main reason why coverage is better now than it was in the 80s and early 90s is because technology has advanced that much and there are more towers, there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't have a dozen or more cell phone carriers all jacked into the same network, that's managed either collectively or by another company that bids to provide the service on a regular basis for whatever region.
All that is do to manufacturing and technology innovation done outside of the phone companies.
Of course, what do you mean by worse? is price the only factor? phone quality has gone down. meaning how people sound.
Doubling contract length is no little thing either.
Here is the biggy for my: It's fragmenting. Phone service being offered by Apple aren't compatible with other devices and this is extremely bad.
20 years ago, if you introduced a phone whose featured could only be shared with people who bought the same phones you would be laughed at and possible sued unless you made the standard available for others to implement. Under that way, anyone could create a phone that could also be used with face time. That was the only reason we could have a phone service where anyone could communicate with anyone else regardless of where they bought their phone, or who the provider was.
So while I can get more features for the same price, other areas are getting worse.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem is that most urban areas in the US have at least 2 choices of ISP, the problem is that they've figured out that they don't have to compete, they just can't discuss it or make it formal. Any competition you see is going to be pretty superficial. Around here we've got Qwest and Comcast. I suppose you could include Clear and Hughes, but nobody does as the latency is even worse.
But, they've figured out that they don't have to compete with each other which means that we're now in the situation where the speed hasn't increased more than nominally in a decade and for the price in other parts of the country we could get a much, much faster connection. But we're poking along at 5mbps and feeling lucky because other parts of the city can't even get that.
Doesn't T-Mobile have a bunch of 4G commercials?
The fine print on T-Mobile's "4G" commercials states that T-Mobile's 4G is HSPA+.
Elementary, dear Watson. Older people generally are NOT tech-friendly, or should I say, nerd techs. It will take a while before today's addicted youths are old enough to have their own "collective memory". Meanwhile, age demographics place the bulk of mainstream users in the two brackets normally at 18-34 years old.
Also remember the "incubation" delay for a 'child' to have any brains AND curiosity to even find out about slashdot, let alone joining it. Suppose our "minimum" age is 12 --that reinforces your point. We do have plenty of older men here, but /. doesn't enforce an age check and wouldn't know our ages other than for old polls where small sample sizes, statistical self-selection problems, the need to pick cowboyneal-answers and the lack of incentive to be truthful would ensure this failed as a viable source. I still hate it when a site like Yahoo or Facebook asks for your full birthdate and gender.
See point #4 for FB age charts.
http://www.kenburbary.com/2010/01/dispelling-the-youth-myth-five-useful-facebook-demographic-statistics/
See this on how Linked In is surprisingly an older-person land.
http://www.penn-olson.com/2009/11/06/linkedin-39-facebook-33-twitter-31-myspace-26/
The company called "AT&T" is not, was not, and has only a tenuous relationship with the entity "Ma Bell," American Telephone a Telegraph. The company called AT&T is actually the old SBC, Southwestern Bell Communications, one of the RBOCs, that took over AT&Ts name and trademarks after buying the AT&T Corporation in 2005.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The FTC uses the Herfindahl index to evaluate market competitiveness. Using just the top 5 carriers (the big four and Tracfone), the current index is 1810 (market share data from here).
'According to the DOJ-FTC 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, the agencies will regard a market in which the post-merger HHI is below 1500 as "unconcentrated," between 1500 and 2500 as "moderately concentrated," and above 2500 as "highly concentrated." A merger potentially raises "significant competitive concerns" if it produces an increase in the HHI of more than 200 points in a moderately concentrated market or more than 100 points in a highly concentrated market. A merger is presumed "likely to enhance market power" if it produces an increase in the HHI of more than 200 points in a highly concentrated market.'
So by their own definition this merger will raise "significant competitive concerns" since the HHI will increase by 650 points to 2460. With all the other little guys added in, it is fair to say that the final number would be more than 2500, i.e. "highly concentrated."
I'm a T-mobile customer with a Nexus S phone that I bought 2 weeks ago. I have learned that my phone won't work on the AT&T network -- at least not for data. That phone cost me over $600 with tax and accessories. It's supposed to take awhile for regulatory review and there's supposed to be some phase out period blah blah blah but I'm losing roughly half of the useful life of my phone -- and I'm the kind of guy that hangs onto my gadgets for a long time so this pisses me off. I cannot switch to another provider in the US because there will be no other GSM provider. If I choose a CDMA provider then my phone won't work abroad.
More importantly, my bill right now for unlimited minutes and 5GB of data per month (one GB more than AT&T's top-of-the-line data plan) plus 400 text messages is a mere $95 per month -- and that's the whole bill taxes and all. I'm not sure how much that'll go up because when I called AT&T to inquire about rates, the poor girl on the phone couldn't figure it out due to the byzantine service options/restrictions imposed by management. From the information I did get, I believe I can expect this to increase to anywhere between $125 and $150 *before* taxes.
T-Mobile is the low cost leader in our phone market. They provide excellent customer service. The were the first to offer an Android phone. AT&T was the last. For those who moan about big government hampering business, I invite you to prepare yourself to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare that AT&T will become. When you are only one of 130 million customers, dealing with your phone company is going to make a trip to the DMV feel like a vacation.
And by the way, I've been to AT&T's headquarters in New Jersey. I attended a business meeting there in the mid 90's as a management consultant. The building was in the middle of a *private golf course* left over from the monopoly days when a long distance call cost around a dollar a minute. The so-called strategists that we met with had no clue what the Internet was all about. In those days, the only reason AT&T was making money was because they had millions of aging customers who didn't realize that they could switch to a different long distance provider and slash their bill by roughly 75%.
This merger sucks for all of us except the fat cats at the top of AT&T and T-Mobile.
Cue the horde of libertarians who think that it's Ma Bell's *right* to stifle innovation and how dare anyone criticise them!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
the "new" AT&T was originally Southwestern Bell, which was one of the original "Baby Bells" after the breakup. The bell doesn't fall too far from the bell tower...
Ralph Nader Coined it. read the link and note that this was before the current economic issues.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0718-02.htm
"Corporate socialism" -- the privatization of profit and the socialization of risks and misconduct
You and I and everyone bears the effects of the risk of large corporation. Everyone on of us ends up paying. That's the socialism part.
here are some more socialisms:
Revolutionary socialism
State socialism
Libertarian socialists
Utopian socialists
Market socialism
You might want to take some time and deconstruct the words Social, socialist, and socialism. Or, you know keep looking like an idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
but I can tell you what I did.
I ported my T-Mobile to Google Voice. I'm not giving a cent to AT&T. Sure it's not as convenient, as I redirect my personal calls to my company phone. But hell. Being raped by telecom companies is somtething I can't afford anymore.
6-7 years ago it was either free to receive text messages or your plan came with a certain amount each month (50 for T-Mobile). They cost 5 cents to 10 cents each.
Now-a-days you get 0 free, pay for all incoming, and all carriers went to 20 cents per message (minimum) within the same 2 month period.
10-15 years ago many plans came with Free first incoming minute. No provider I know of does this now (though in fairness it was subject to abuse).
That "free" smartphone usually requires you pay for internet ($25-$35 a month for 2 years). I remember a few years back 1 year was a standard contract and 2 years was deemed excessive. Today 2 years is the norm (with few exceptions).
They are even going to orphan the phones.
I'd say some things have gotten better, and some worse over the years:
Better:
1: Domestic roaming. When I had either AT&T and SBC Wireless [1], if I drove a small distance out of Austin, and if I ended up calling someone from a cafe, the roaming charges were pretty substantial. These days, it doesn't matter, because one isn't going to get hit by roaming charges in the US. Outside the US, and across the pond, this is different.
2: Cost of a phone. $400-$600 for a phone as well as a year contract. Blergh. These days, one can pay 15 bucks, get a T-Mobile to go prepaid phone, and periodically toss some money for minutes at the device, and have basic communication. If one wants a 1-2 year contract, one can get a decent Android phone for the price of the contract.
3: Cloning. Before AMPS was shown the door, it was pretty common for someone to be able to grab one's ESN/MIN info and go to town. These days, the resources to even copy an IMEI to a different device are beyond all but the most sophisticated attackers.
4: Text messaging. In the past, this was fairly expensive. These days for someone like me who sends/receives a good amount of SMS/MMS messages a month, it is well worth it.
What has gotten worse:
1: Tethering. I bought my T-Mobile MDA (HTC Wizard), and it allowed tethering out of the box, where one just flipped the modem on, and one had rather slow Internet access pretty much everywhere. EDGE was sluggish, but it did get the job done. Now, tethering costs a good chunk a month.
2: ETF charges. $150 from SBC Wireless, I don't mind. $350... yeesh.
3: Bandwidth charges. There are times when I can easily run over 10GB/month on a device, especially with cloud based backups and storage.
4: Tinkerer-hostile devices. Motorola we all know tells modders to go elsewhere, HTC is being held up to the wall and bitch-slapped by the carriers to make their phones unable to take unofficial Android upgrades. Other phone makers are touch and go. In the past, if one bought a smartphone, it was essentially open to whatever you wanted to do with it. Even Apple's devices are getting harder and harder to completely JB and unlock.
[1]: SBC Wireless was a CDMA provider, and AT&T was TDMA at the time. I am glad we have GSM-based networks now, just for the ease of changing out phones with SIM cards.
because one multi billion dollar company (Sprint) is accusing another (AT&T) of stifling innovation.
The merger will swell ranks of union that backs Democrats. This deal will be approved quickly so money will be available for the 2012 election.
I know AT&T doesn't make the phone, but they were the ones willing to take a chance with Apple. Now, the iPhone has defined what is a smartphone. AT&T had to work with Apple to support visual voicemail. Their Mark the Spot app let's me give them real-time field reports on dropped calls, weak signal, no data, so they can improve the network. As far as competition, Apple has redefined the carrier relationship, taking much of the carriers control from them. I would like to say Android follows this trend, but it doesn't. I think carriers see Android as a way to wrest control back. I am betting my LTE iPhone 5 next year makes carriers interchangeable, and I am betting Android ends up more like Linux than Windows.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
AT&T and T-Mobile will merge in the biggest marriage of telecom companies in history. No reception is planned.
This is a good story about stifling innovation, but did the fact that AT&T was a monopoly really stifle it? It's easy for us to look back and say, "This one guy made something game changing and it was covered up by a monopoly", but why was it just that one guy? How was the monopoly preventing others from finding this out on their own? Was AT&T running around and silencing everyone in the world who could have experimented with magnetic tape? Did busting up the monopoly free this technology up?
Even in the current market, it's possible for some dude at AT&T to come up with something that threatens their business model and be stifled. Is it somehow better because t-mobile is still out there? Nobody came up with that idea at t-mobile or verizon. it's still just as stifled and in 60 years we can look back and say, "oh man, if at&t hadn't hidden this we'd have had gigabit wireless everywhere for decades!" or whatever it is.
When Pacific Bell bought the rubble of AT&T, and a year later began wearing that name, it was fully cursed.
As when Gollum put on the ring and the full evil of it flowed through him, changing him forever, so did invoking the name AT&T bring true evil into the world.
I was at a baby bell in the 90's, just after and during the time when these labs were getting torn down. After struggling for years to generate high income quick-hit research, the budgets of these labs were quickly transitioned into IT and software development in an effort to generate service profits and enlarge the short-term profits. The baby bells built caller-id, call waiting and bigger billing systems. Excess R&D was given to Universities and funded many academic labs.
So developers should probably be thankful for the opportunities really... It's likely that the demise of pure R&D was a big contributor to the growth of PC hardware, software and internet development.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
night/weekend minutes and anyone on the same carrier is free minutes were both things that came about because of competition (and were popular enough that all the carriers started offering the benefits). It's because of the fall in number of carriers that the price has stayed at $40 or gone up (if their was competition, then the price would of gone down as the technology matured and became cheaper).
No contract with 300 minutes, unlimited text, data. $25 per month. For $40 you get 1200 minutes. I can't believe all the people posting stuff like "I only pay $99 per month."
"may do" implies they're not stifling innovation now. How about this:
Ma Bell Stifled Innovation, AT&T May Continue On Doing the Same.
Of COURSE innovation will go down. As someone who remembers the old ma-bell days....when they came out with a phone that WASN'T any color but black, people thought it couldn't get any better than this! Once Ma-Bell was split, we had these neat things that came along. Cordless (landline) phones, answering machines, voice mail, pagers (that were affordable!) and in the late 80's bag phones and then the Motorola brick! The rest, is history. Once at&t gobbles up t-mobile (and they will...they've greased enough palms), even though they say they won't, you can bet Verizon will throw a ton of money at Sprint to get them. Sprint's CEO says he wouldn't sell, but, you know 99.9% of the people will take the money and run. Once you have Verizon & at&t as the only companies providing wireless service, they can come up with a new gadget every once in a while, but with the bulk of people on contracts anyway, you won't get the churn like you did when there were a dozen wireless providers, not to mention the cool whiz-bang devices to use. Two things will happen, to say the least. 1. Prices will go up 2. Service will go down
Hey, I'm old. I remember that age well. Don't start with that "Mussolini made the trains run on time" crap with me in the room!
False. I broke our phone twice in the 1960s.
False. If your neighbor knew the phone company service manager for your block, he got additional free extensions and you didn't.
Not really false. It was the same level of service as today, for land lines.
Not any better than today. Outages tended to last longer back then, though.
Not according to my sister who has a flat in Paris. She wishes she had phone service as good as mine in the USA, and frequently says so.
Whilst doing everything possible to prevent same.
"Cell phones" were invented independently many times, it's a fairly obvious idea.
However, its implementation is very complex. It was not technically possible to build a true cellular network until late 70-s.
A predecessor of cellular networks - a trunked mobile phone network was simultaneously developed in multiple countries. For example, the Soviet "Altai" mobile trunked phone system went live back in 1958 (about 4 months before analogous system in the USA).
My only option from the phone company is still the same shitty 3.0Mbps/768kbps ADSL service that was introduced to our town in 1999. Where's that innovation I've been hearing about again?
Hughes is typically called 'fraudband'- and from the recent implosion Clear's apparently undergoing and the spat with them and Sprint (with rumors of Sprint planning to go LTE here shortly...) they probably ought to be called that as well... >;-D
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For a ~century long history of the pattern of innovation vs. consolidation in media and communications, see Tim Wu's "The Master Switch", 2010.
AT&T started as a "benevolent monopoly", and only became virulently anti-competitive when challenged in the 70's, until finally broken up by the feds.
The resurrected AT&T has all the anti-competition monopolist tendencies, complete with revolving door government lobbyists to write laws for them - and none of the civic duty, for-the-common-good impulses institutionally prescribed by Theodore Vail.
"The Master Switch" http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-Borzoi/dp/0307269930
Tim Wu's Homepage http://timwu.org/
How silly. In the 70 or so years Ma Bell was around they brought us incredible innovation on our landlines. We got call waiting, long distance calling, touchtone phones, phones so sturdy you could kill a bear with them, individual lines (no more party lines), phone service for rural communities. How can that possible compare to the meager telecommunication innovation we've seen in the last 25 years since she was dismantled. *tongue firmly in cheek*
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This former Sprint employee seems to recall this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.
This is not your fathers's AT&T. This is the "new" AT&T, grown like a cancer from SBC, spun out of the original AT&T by divestiture in 1984. SBC is a nasty bunch. I would rather do business with the "old" AT&T than the"new" SBC-AT&T. Hell, I'd rather do "business" with "Old Scratch" than the new AT&T.
I canceled my home phone service and internet data service just to get rid of those pricks. I am a T-Mobile customer now, but I will surely abandon if AT&T takes over. Worst customer service ever. Worst attitude ever. Worst Telco Ever. I'd even go into the arms of the Dread Verizon (another RBOC) to avoid these turds. Yecch!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
That AT&T died in 2005 when it was bought by SBC.
Where do you think SBC came from? ATT never really died. It got cut into pieces and now the pieces have come back together. Still the same old AT&T.
I jumped from the new AT&T to T-Mobile precisely because it stifled innovation and was more interested in locking down systems than providing any kind of useful service. They're seriously the only telco I've ever come across that couldn't reverse their own admitted mistake on an account.
...and now my only reasonable option for a much-needed upgrade is the G2X, because if AT&T is allowed to eat T-Mobile, not only will I be stuck having to opt out of what was a great contract, I'll have to use the only phone in the lineup that would actually function on the network once they've dismantled it.
Hell, AT&T can't even figure out how to get Amazon's Appstore to function on their network due to their policy of locking everything until forced to do otherwise. It's Ma Bell all over again, but without the benefits. Blocking the merger shouldn't even be a question of "if". As it is, AT&T is essentially a re-assembled zombie under more obnoxious management. Does anyone actually believe they would wield newfound and wholly unfettered power with any measure of responsibility?
I used to work for AT&T Bell Labs. There was plenty of good research, development and innovation going on then. Yes, it took a lot of money because real innovation is not cheap and more competition only guarantees cheap products and services, not (necessarily) innovation. Yes, they were heavily regulated (even after 1984). Anyone who says Ma Bell stifled innovation did work there. Today's at&t is a result of the merger of some of the Regional Bell Operating Company's (RBOCs) that were spun off when the U.S. government broke up AT&T in 1984 (so are Verizon and Qwest). All their innovation came from what is now long gone and/or sold to Alcatel. There hasn't been much innovation for at&t to stifle, so the argument against the acquisition is really only about its effect on the cost to the consumer.
Anyone who says Ma Bell stifled innovation didn't work there. (Of course ;-)