5 ms·

Funny how people hate these large monopolies, but they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.

ipdashc 8mo ago
I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today. I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
- ssl-3 8mo ago
  It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.) The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house. I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something. If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.
  - CPLX 8mo ago
    I mean the old AT&T does exist. It’s called Verizon and it’s not that great.
    - toast0 8mo ago
      Verizon decends from Bell ROCs, but not from the national AT&T company. Current AT&T is the result of Bell ROCs buying out the national AT&T company. But it's not the same company at all. The commitment to reliability is gone, the full vertical integration is gone, the monopoly revenues are gone. The market for phone calls is quite different as well. It's a shame to have lost reliability and the increase in latency for audio is objectively bad and I don't know if we'll ever get back to near zero added latency on phone calls. Otoh, telecom competititon has driven much more capable and less expensive offerings, when they work.
  - topspin 8mo ago
    > It was ridiculously reliable. Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties. For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.
    - ssl-3 8mo ago
      ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time. Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities. Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done. And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?). And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion. Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either). We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
      - p_ing 8mo ago
        Playing TFC, I always got faster ping times than the early cable users. ISDN was great.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables. The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.
- mmooss 8mo ago
  Those are lovely rose-colored glasses! :) My understanding is that they also charged high rates for calling the next city, and more for calling further, opposed / dragged their heels on new tech like broadband data .... Since then we have essentially free communication - voice, video, and text - anywhere in the world, several broadband technologies, cell phones, endless VOIP options, faxes (did AT&T support those?) ... in fact, landlines are mostly gone. Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.
  - olyjohn 8mo ago
    Yeah I remember paying long distance fees to call to the next town that was a 15 minute drive away.
hydrogen7800 8mo ago
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
- Lammy 8mo ago
  Relevant wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
mmooss 8mo ago
> they are the only ones that can actually DO something real. Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.
- heraldgeezer 8mo ago
  And who lays the cables for the IT world to even work? Google does some, but the world's largest carrier is a Swedish company (their former ATT basically)
  - protocolture 8mo ago
    >And who lays the cables for the IT world to even work? What a loaded question. Anyone and everyone lays cables.
protocolture 8mo ago
"DO something real" You want to like, expand on that at all? Its obviously hyperbole, but its hard to gauge to what extent you believe it.
- heraldgeezer 8mo ago
  Build the actual infra. Not playing with CSS all day.
  - protocolture 8mo ago
    One of my customers is a rural ISP that has lit 4 small towns. They dont have a monopoly. They overbuilt (some might say, quasi legally) our national wholesaler. They are themselves being overbuilt by other parties at one of their sites. Their backhaul from the middle of nowhere is being carried by 2 diverse entities of 5 major inter suburban fibre carriers. Any questions or goal post shifts?
    - heraldgeezer 8mo ago
      >rural ISP So nothing then in the grand scale of things.

I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today. I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.

ssl-3 8mo ago
It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.) The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house. I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something. If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.
- CPLX 8mo ago
  I mean the old AT&T does exist. It’s called Verizon and it’s not that great.
  - toast0 8mo ago
    Verizon decends from Bell ROCs, but not from the national AT&T company. Current AT&T is the result of Bell ROCs buying out the national AT&T company. But it's not the same company at all. The commitment to reliability is gone, the full vertical integration is gone, the monopoly revenues are gone. The market for phone calls is quite different as well. It's a shame to have lost reliability and the increase in latency for audio is objectively bad and I don't know if we'll ever get back to near zero added latency on phone calls. Otoh, telecom competititon has driven much more capable and less expensive offerings, when they work.
- topspin 8mo ago
  > It was ridiculously reliable. Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties. For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.
  - ssl-3 8mo ago
    ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time. Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities. Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done. And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?). And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion. Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either). We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
    - p_ing 8mo ago
      Playing TFC, I always got faster ping times than the early cable users. ISDN was great.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables. The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.
mmooss 8mo ago
Those are lovely rose-colored glasses! :) My understanding is that they also charged high rates for calling the next city, and more for calling further, opposed / dragged their heels on new tech like broadband data .... Since then we have essentially free communication - voice, video, and text - anywhere in the world, several broadband technologies, cell phones, endless VOIP options, faxes (did AT&T support those?) ... in fact, landlines are mostly gone. Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.
- olyjohn 8mo ago
  Yeah I remember paying long distance fees to call to the next town that was a 15 minute drive away.

hydrogen7800 8mo ago

Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?

Lammy 8mo ago
Relevant wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

mmooss 8mo ago

> they are the only ones that can actually DO something real. Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.

heraldgeezer 8mo ago
And who lays the cables for the IT world to even work? Google does some, but the world's largest carrier is a Swedish company (their former ATT basically)
- protocolture 8mo ago
  >And who lays the cables for the IT world to even work? What a loaded question. Anyone and everyone lays cables.

protocolture 8mo ago

"DO something real" You want to like, expand on that at all? Its obviously hyperbole, but its hard to gauge to what extent you believe it.

heraldgeezer 8mo ago
Build the actual infra. Not playing with CSS all day.
- protocolture 8mo ago
  One of my customers is a rural ISP that has lit 4 small towns. They dont have a monopoly. They overbuilt (some might say, quasi legally) our national wholesaler. They are themselves being overbuilt by other parties at one of their sites. Their backhaul from the middle of nowhere is being carried by 2 diverse entities of 5 major inter suburban fibre carriers. Any questions or goal post shifts?
  - heraldgeezer 8mo ago
    >rural ISP So nothing then in the grand scale of things.