
AT&T history (image) - prakash
http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/9febb22e4ffda852a1aca31776f0f609683fe92b
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biohacker42
The competition from the break up of AT&T led to a lot of innovation and price
reductions. A lot high tech jobs were created and it was one of the sparks for
the .com boom.

An odd thing to remember is that regulation stipulated that local phone
companies could keep their monopoly as long as they didn't enter the long
distance market.

So you ended up with long distance rates cheaper then local rates. It was a
lot cheaper to talk to someone on the other end of the country then to someone
down the street.

After the initial scattering AT&T has been coalescing together again, like the
liquid terminator.

Competition is important but much more important is startup cost. How hard it
is to enter a market plays a huge role in how competitive that market is. How
many established competitors there are matters as well, but surprisingly not
as much.

Then again if you think about it a little it is not that surprising.

Government regulation of the spectrum and the expense of digging ditches to
lay fiber combine to make starting your own telco. VERY expensive.

As a libertarian here's my $0.02. Either the government should get out of
regulation all together. And then I can start an ISP/Cable company/Phone
company for the price of a few WiFi antennas and some servers to run Asterisk
and MythTV.

Or the government can go the other way and regulate fiber too, and make it
like bridges, paid for by the tax payer, free to use by everyone. I don't
really want to see the Feds do that, but I love it when small towns do it, and
I hate it when the local monopoly telco. sues them.

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run4yourlives
>Or the government can go the other way and regulate fiber too, and make it
like bridges, paid for by the tax payer, free to use by everyone.

There's the rub. It works for bridges and tunnels and highways and all that,
but for telecom, there's some sort of weird "we own these lines" crap.

Could you imagine if highways were run the way telecom is being run? You'd be
okay until you had to leave the city, where you'd encounter massive toll
roads, then, once you decided to leave the state, you'd have to pay even
higher tolls because you'd be using "someone else's" roads. The literal
"roaming charge".

Insanity. Government should nationalize all communications infrastructure and
allow the ATT's of the world to sell access in a largely unregulated market.
Low cost of entry, plus stiff competition and everyone wins.

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bayleo
I've seen this image before. One missing divestiture of note is the Bell
Labs/Lucent spin-off from AT&T in 1996.

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callmeed
Where's Pacific Bell (PacBell)? As a kid in California, I recall going from
PacBell to SBC to AT&T ...

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enf
Pac Bell was part of the Pacific Telesis branch.

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randomwalker
i'm too young to remember, but i always thought the 1984 break up resulted in
4 companies. apparently it was 9.

wow.

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fromedome
Nice. What's the source on this?

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prakash
I saw it on friendfeed.

