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When I grew up the telephone company was still a state-run monopoly. To get telephone service connected you had to pay a nominal fee, independent of whether th
by HarryHirsch 12y ago
When I grew up the telephone company was still a state-run monopoly. To get telephone service connected you had to pay a nominal fee, independent of whether there was trenching and laying of cable involved, or if they just had to connect at the patch panel.
Today's unregulated quasi-monopolies are some progress. Can we get the government monopoly back? The thing is - it worked extremely well!
- ghaff 12y agoIt was very reliable and simple in any case (talking about AT&T). Long distance phone calls were also about 50 cents/minute interstate (and even longer distance intrastate) in the early 1980s and for a long time you couldn't even attach your own gear to the phone lines in your house. You had to rent AT&T phones. Some of this is a function of the general technological advance between then and now of course but Ma Bell was certainly not a fast moving organization. From a 1976 SNL skit: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Government monopoly wasn't nirvana by a long shot.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]