> Ameritech/SBC, now AT&T, received, IIRC, circa $750 million in incentives to deploy universal access to high speed Internet throughout Illinois.
Are you talking about the Ameritech/SBC merger?
Are you talking about the Ameritech/SBC merger?
They subsequently acquired the remains of AT&T; a few other things, and the name with which they subsequently rebranded themselves.
My point was more the "money for nothing" aspect; I merely don't remember off the cuff what exact name/branding they had at that point in time. Ameritech got bought out by ("merged with") SBC. Then the "merged" SBC bought the remaining piece of AT&T that included the name. A lot of the tech stuff, that had ended up in Lucent, went instead to Alcatel, IIRC (making a hole in the Omaha tech scene, among other things).
P.S. That's how I remember it, now. I wasn't involved -- well, other than being rather thoroughly shafted by then Ameritech/SBC (and now I seem to recall their carrying such a combined name, during the transition) on a home DSL deployment. I ended up learning from their own rather thoroughly demoralized tech support that almost all of that was outsourced: Installations, IT, etc. One actual Ameritech/SBC employee (or was it before the SBC "merger"?... sigh) told me that all they could do was file tickets. Those went to third parties, and they couldn't do a damned thing about following up on them.
Doing a tracert showed over ten hops -- sometimes well over, before your packets even left their "network" to the wider world. And that was the least of the customer's problems...
I mean it could be some other program, of course. I'm just trying to figure out the history.
"Money for nothing" was my quip, regarding the company's apparent attitude. The company agreed to it all, then started lobbying to get out of their commitments under the deal -- while not giving up the tax breaks and other concessions they'd gained by making said commitments. The agreement bound them to do these things; they turned around and lobbied the Illinois legislature to "unbind" them, while leaving the rest in place.
Anecdotally, even in Chicagoland, they continued to drag their feet until the cable TV companies starting deploying wholesale. Depending on location, this often was some years later. Then, suddenly. the now-AT&T would get serious about their own deployment. Well, kind of serious: Technically, it often still sucked, by comparison.
This is, in my view, analogous to the failures of big ISP's, in various states, until they face competition, for instance by communities finally just rolling their own municipal and/or cooperative broadband. Then, these big ISP's go to the legislature of whatever state and cry (i.e. lobby), "Unfair competition!"
One has to keep telling these stories, so that maybe voters will pay enough attention to their state politics to vote out their elected officials who participate in these giveaways, that someone at sometime conveniently nicknamed "corporate welfare".
Maybe even vote in and support a state attorney general willing to initiate investigations and, where evidence of corruption can be found, send a few of those officials to jail.
From a regulatory economics point of view, telecom deregulation was one of the big success stories, along with airlines and trucking. For the most part, Western Europe copied it. But our wireline infrastructure is still better than every big European country, because we have invested massively in it: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... (see page 12).
I'll look later for some old articles, if I don't get too distracted.
I'll consider what you describe and what you linked. From memory and off the cuff, it reminds me of all the fiber investment around that time that seemed to undergo a value implosion and leave substantial "dark fiber" waiting for new projects/investments to pick it up. MCI and Wordcom (?) come to mind. (And the bath that some investors took.)
If I was understanding one of them correctly, a year or two ago, my German friends could get high speed wireless Internet (from T-Mobile) at their newly purchased country home in the middle of the Eifel "Mountains" rural... "farmscape", I'll call it, for I think 40 Euro / month. Fast enough to stream, and no data cap.
Meantime, here I was still reduced to just Comcast, as AT&T had over the course of a decade and a half never upgraded my block's line that was so old and poor quality that it wouldn't even reliably support DSL. And I'm in the middle of suburbia in a fairly dense sub-division. Comcast wanted $95/month for their high-speed Internet (with basic cable TV, the way they price their packages; gotta keep their cable TV demographics up). And that was after arm-twisting one of their reps for a discount. In the meantime, that number's up to about $135/month.
Whatever the state of our technology, it's not translating here to effective competition and prices that compare to what friends are getting in Europe. Not even close. In my limited experience.
P.S. On the other hand, I'd hate to buy an expensive laptop over there.
Which is really remarkable when you think about it. There is no other infrastructure that the U.S. does better than Germany or France. Our trains, subways, and roads are shameful compared to theirs. But our internet access is better. That's a real testament to the success of the 1996 deregulation.
"A Year After Merger With Ameritech, SBC Still Hasn't Met FCC Conditions" https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB971041139934224266
I didn't look much for articles about when, if, or how SBC got out of these FCC requirements.