Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: "Fred R. Goldstein" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Phone Frustration Message-ID: <2425@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 26 Dec 89 15:14:54 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton MA USA Lines: 88 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 596, message 1 of 5 In article <2378@accuvax.nwu.edu>, ptownson@eecs.nwu.edu (Patrick Townson) writes... >>Thus, even without the breakup, we would have been likely to see this >>scenario. Indeed, it is a common one in France where COCOT's have >>been authorized for decades and the telephone company is still a >>monopoly. >And France has really great and effecient phone service, don't they? >What a great example for Americans! What a goal to strive for! Phone >service as good as that in France. COCOTS may have been authorized as >of 1968, but they did not begin appearing on the scene until the >early 1980's -- once they knew that AT&T was unlikely to find a legal >environment friendly enough to stop them. etc... in an exchange with Marvin Sirbu. I hope the moderator won't censor my "amen" to Marvin Sirbu's comments. I'm also sick and tired of hearing our "moderator" treat Judge Greene like the Spanish Inquisition. I was working in the telecom biz before "divestiture" and while there are certainly problems, I hardly think it's nearly as bad as Patrick likes to claim it is, and most of the problems I see have very little to do with divestiture itself! It's rather like laying blame for the cold weather on divestiture: There's no causality, but heck, wasn't it warm back in the winter of '77? COCOTs are an oddity. They do stem from a set of circumstances that very remotely include divestiture, but mainly they're an FCC creation. Remember "mad monk Mark" Fowler, the Ceaucescu of M St., who ranted his way through his FCC term about "competition" while really doing everything in his power to help monopolies crush it, and mainly screw the consumer. I think I've posted this before, but COCOTs as we know them stem from the following succession of events: 1) Carterfone allowed customers to plug things into phone lines. This was a 1968 decision that broke one of the most noxious monopolies in modern history and made technological progress possible. But Carterfone and the later Registration rules (Part 68) made one excetion: Pay phones. That was because existing pay phone technology would have left too much chance for fraud. COCOTS were invented later, and depend upon microprocessors. So... 2) In the early '80s, the FCC decided to allow registration of phones with coin slots on them. They look like regular phones to the telco line, so the old rules were technologically unnecessary. Of course, you couldn't have made money on them except for... 3) Sharing and resale. In the '70s, the FCC overrode AT&T rules against sharing and reselling lines. Europe, of course, always allowed the monopoly-provided calls to be resold, since the monopoly always got its due. AT&T was even stricter, though, and had allowed no resale. That made Full Time WATS practical, and it was the first casualty. (TELPAK also was a victim of resale.) So if you could resell interstate calls (intrastate being governed separately), you could make money on a COCOT. But how could you handle the big-money coinless toll calls? Enter... 4) Equal access. This part came from divestiture. The idea was to make MCI et al equal to AT&T. So anybody's Long Distance company could get access to Bell bills. At any rate. Thus the AOS scumballs came into being. The FCC has every right to regulate them, of course, as the states can (and do) regulate their intrastate calls. But the FCC seems to like scumballs. All the judge did was require the FCC to treat AT&T, MCI and scum more or less equally, though AT&T's rate setting is still (quite reasonably) subject to increased scrutiny due to its overwhelming market power. I should also point out that it was the Dept. of Justice (again Reagan's ideologues) and AT&T who cooked up the divestiture as a response to an old (1949?) festering anti-trust suit where AT&T appeared to be incredibly guilty. So rather than separate Western Electric (leaving AT&T a PTT-like service provider), as the original suit had asked, AT&T made the deal to keep WECo and become a big force in computers (heh heh). The Judge simply ironed out the most noxious portions of the deal, leaving a few crumbs for the RBOCs. But our revisionist moderator's version of history seems to blame it all on the Judge. Oh well, a nice simple but wrong answer is always easier to spew out than the more complex truth. Fred R. Goldstein goldstein@carafe.enet.dec.com or goldstein@delni.enet.dec.com voice: +1 508 486 7388 I speak for me. Sharing requires permission.