AT&T history (image)
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An odd thing to remember is that regulation stipulated that local phone companies could keep their monopoly as long as they didn't enter the long distance market.
So you ended up with long distance rates cheaper then local rates. It was a lot cheaper to talk to someone on the other end of the country then to someone down the street.
After the initial scattering AT&T has been coalescing together again, like the liquid terminator.
Competition is important but much more important is startup cost. How hard it is to enter a market plays a huge role in how competitive that market is. How many established competitors there are matters as well, but surprisingly not as much.
Then again if you think about it a little it is not that surprising.
Government regulation of the spectrum and the expense of digging ditches to lay fiber combine to make starting your own telco. VERY expensive.
As a libertarian here's my $0.02. Either the government should get out of regulation all together. And then I can start an ISP/Cable company/Phone company for the price of a few WiFi antennas and some servers to run Asterisk and MythTV.
Or the government can go the other way and regulate fiber too, and make it like bridges, paid for by the tax payer, free to use by everyone. I don't really want to see the Feds do that, but I love it when small towns do it, and I hate it when the local monopoly telco. sues them.
There's the rub. It works for bridges and tunnels and highways and all that, but for telecom, there's some sort of weird "we own these lines" crap.
Could you imagine if highways were run the way telecom is being run? You'd be okay until you had to leave the city, where you'd encounter massive toll roads, then, once you decided to leave the state, you'd have to pay even higher tolls because you'd be using "someone else's" roads. The literal "roaming charge".
Insanity. Government should nationalize all communications infrastructure and allow the ATT's of the world to sell access in a largely unregulated market. Low cost of entry, plus stiff competition and everyone wins.
wow.