I rememberwhenMa Bell included Bell, Western Electric and AT&T working all in the same company. All was well. If you phone went out you went to a neighbor, called the LOCAL repair service who dispatched that day in a matter of hours and not a week from next Tuesday. The repair was done and no bill for it as it was figured in.
Bell ran the most efficient ran as a utility which is what it actually was.
They could keep a big enough crew to handle anything that came up. When the work was caught up then preventative maintenance was done. You didn't have to call several companies to get accounting issues settled either.
Old Ma Bell did have some problems but not near as many as the split created.
I remember the good old days when Ma Bell wouldn't allow you to attach an answering machine or a fax machine or a computer modem to your telephone connection.
Ah the good old days.
A long distance call was a buck in the day and sixty cents at night.
You could have any phone you liked-- as long as it was black and weighed thirty five pounds.
A second jack in the house? Well, let's see if we can get another mortgage.
Instead of tennis elbow you got phone knuckle from the rotarty dial.
Ma Bell was not a "benign" monopoly.
Do you remember what long distance cost per minute? even when you don't discount for inflation? ATT was still hitting me for $.35 a minute when I got my LD switched over to a $.05/minute company. ATT sent me ads fairly recently telling me how much I can save by getting their LD service for 20 cents/min. for the first 3 months (plus tax and tag, of course).
yep, and if you were an employee you got free service, my old man work for the old "PT&T"(pacific telisis,pac tel,SBC) for 35 yrs got early retirement in 1982. I got all kinds of cool stuff when I was a kid
"Bell ran the most efficient ran as a utility which is what it actually was.
They could keep a big enough crew to handle anything that came up"
Well, it depends on how you measure "efficiency". Yes, a dictatorship is a very "efficient" form of government, too.
The Ma Bell that you are so nostalgic over could afford all the overhead they had because they simply rolled it into one big cost and told the government "this is what it costs to run a phone company" and the government let them charge that, plus a margin for profit.
Not only was this bad for the consumer, but it spoiled every single top manager at AT&T - they simply never learned what needed to be done to run a competitive business - That is why former AT&T executives almost to a person have been failures in any post-AT&T executive management position.
Now, as to being able to have crews on standby to fix any problem......Do you know how much phone service would cost today if you had Union CWA workers staffed up to provide the sort of service you envision? It would be staggeringly expensive - service today would rival your mortgage payment if that were allowed to continue.
The AT&T breakup was as necessary as it was inevitable. This reconsolidation will only succeed if they jettison massive numbers of staff, lose the unions and pension obligations, and invest heavily in the technology to stay ahead of smaller, but highly scalable competitors. I doubt that they can pull it off, given where they've come from and the business models they created for themselves, but it will be fun to see them try.
As you may know the split was a money grab by the likes of Sprint and MCI who exploited the desire of people to pay cheap long distance.