Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wugate!wuarchive!swbatl!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: zygot!john@apple.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: US Sprint Code-abuse Policies Message-ID: Date: 19 Jul 89 00:47:10 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Organization: ATI Wares Team Lines: 33 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 245, message 2 of 8 In article , telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) writes: > You can't do it this way! AT&T takes the good with the bad. They do prosecute > for theft of service, as they rightly should; as as Sprint and others should > do. But AT&T takes the concept of universal service and the importance of > service availability quite seriously. They won't ever chop off innocent > customers just to spite someone else. Another item of interest: the alternative carriers have really let the small-town user down. Several years ago, as the result of pressure from MCI, along with others, the California PUC passed an edict that all Pac*Bell exchanges would have to be fully equal access compliant by the end of 1987. This sent Pac*Bell scrambling to replace ancient SXS switches with DMS and caused them to glue CONTAC onto their remaining #5 crossbar war wagons. As a result of all this, Pac*Bell probably has the highest percentage of equal access exchanges in the country, but so what? If you go out of metropolitan areas, like Weed, or Baker, or Los Banos, you will find equal access telephones with no carriers available except for Mother. Why? Well, Sprint, MCI, Telesphere, and all the rest don't *really* want to bother with sleepy little out-of-the-way communities. Since only Mother has to provide universal service, why should they spend all that money just so a few people can use their service. No, my friends, what they were really after was to have the metro areas have universal equal access so that they could maximize their penetration in areas that required minimal cost. Someone from Weed let me know when someone other than AT&T provides feature group D long distance from up there. I'm not holding my breath. -- John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.uucp | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !