[ipdashc]

I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.

I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.

[ssl-3]

It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.)

The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house.

I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something.

If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.

[topspin]

> It was ridiculously reliable.

Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties.

For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.

[dylan604]

I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables.

The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.

[CPLX]

I mean the old AT&T does exist. It’s called Verizon and it’s not that great.

[mmooss]

Those are lovely rose-colored glasses! :) My understanding is that they also charged high rates for calling the next city, and more for calling further, opposed / dragged their heels on new tech like broadband data .... Since then we have essentially free communication - voice, video, and text - anywhere in the world, several broadband technologies, cell phones, endless VOIP options, faxes (did AT&T support those?) ... in fact, landlines are mostly gone.

Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.

[olyjohn]

Yeah I remember paying long distance fees to call to the next town that was a 15 minute drive away.