4 ms·

Then it's equally broken for everyone. Nationalized or quasi-nationalized (heavily regulated) telecom companies used to be dysfunctional and sometimes comicall

Then it's equally broken for everyone. Nationalized or quasi-nationalized (heavily regulated) telecom companies used to be dysfunctional and sometimes comically inept but at least they weren't actively hostile against consumers and businesses.

ams6110 9y ago
Do you remember the monopoly ATT "ma bell" when a long distance call to friends or family was so expensive that it was reserved for emergencies or very special occasions? Maybe they weren't actively hostile in their pricing but compared to today when you can talk to anyone in the world for no cost, it's not something I'd want to return to.
- astrodust 9y ago
  Data services back then like frame relay were so slow they could barely carry a single voice conversation over them. Long distance switching involved physically connecting together circuits over vast distances, the equipment involved was fantastically expensive and extremely intricate, in many cases all mechanical. So yeah, it was stupidly expensive to make long distance calls because the equipment itself was stupidly expensive. Now the net cost of adding a phone circuit is almost zero, they just provision it on the digital switch. That today they charge for long distance is the criminal thing: We can video chat to anyone in the world for basically free. The singular reason for declining prices is not deregulation, but the simple fact that as technology improves the cost of data goes down. First it became practical to transmit voice over IP, then later video, and now it's trivial for both cases. The world you don't want to return to is where IP isn't omnipresent and bandwidth is crazy expensive because the equipment to handle it at scale hasn't been invented yet.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Technology has helped bring down the cost, obviously. But a big part of the reason long distance was so expensive was because government regulations forced AT&T to use its long-distance service to subsidize local service: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/1983/7/v7n4-6.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....
    - astrodust 9y ago
      That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised? Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available. I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo. After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing. Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do. Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ams6110 9y ago

Do you remember the monopoly ATT "ma bell" when a long distance call to friends or family was so expensive that it was reserved for emergencies or very special occasions? Maybe they weren't actively hostile in their pricing but compared to today when you can talk to anyone in the world for no cost, it's not something I'd want to return to.

astrodust 9y ago
Data services back then like frame relay were so slow they could barely carry a single voice conversation over them. Long distance switching involved physically connecting together circuits over vast distances, the equipment involved was fantastically expensive and extremely intricate, in many cases all mechanical. So yeah, it was stupidly expensive to make long distance calls because the equipment itself was stupidly expensive. Now the net cost of adding a phone circuit is almost zero, they just provision it on the digital switch. That today they charge for long distance is the criminal thing: We can video chat to anyone in the world for basically free. The singular reason for declining prices is not deregulation, but the simple fact that as technology improves the cost of data goes down. First it became practical to transmit voice over IP, then later video, and now it's trivial for both cases. The world you don't want to return to is where IP isn't omnipresent and bandwidth is crazy expensive because the equipment to handle it at scale hasn't been invented yet.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Technology has helped bring down the cost, obviously. But a big part of the reason long distance was so expensive was because government regulations forced AT&T to use its long-distance service to subsidize local service: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/1983/7/v7n4-6.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....
  - astrodust 9y ago
    That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised? Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available. I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo. After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing. Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do. Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]