Steady Light on Hold.

There are at least two sides to this story.


On one side you have big city business subsidizing rural service.

On the other side you have shady accounting procedures guaranteeing a rate of return regardless of quality of service.

I moved into a basement apartment in Brooklyn in 1968 and ordered a phone. NY Tel said they'd be there a week from Wednesday. I took off from school and work and stayed home to wait for the installer. Instead of an installation I got a card that said "No Cable".

This went on for months until after being placed on hold for 45 minutes and left there after everyone went home for the day my screaming got me to the night dispatch foreman. He explained that "No Cable" was not that there was no wire at the locker, but that there were no spare pairs in the feeder cable that supplied service to my neighborhood. I would not get service until a new cable was installed. Estimated installation date? 1980!

Lest you think this was a problem of the distant past, I put a microwave shot in to supply GSA with Dial Tone back around 1998. They were moving into an old printing plant in Brooklyn under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and needed 500 lines of Centrex. NYNEX had 6 spare pairs in the neighborhood and no idea when they would put new cable in. I put a T-3 shot in from Metrotech in Downtown Brooklyn and got them up and running in a week.

Those of us who came in to Interconnect early on remember the dearth of features that Bell offered its business subscribers. One job in particular stands out in my memory.
I installed an NEC Crossbar switch (NA-409) with 1A2 sets for a company on Long Island. We duplicated EVERYTHING the customer had before. NY Tel had a 409 installed too. The customer said he liked the system so he got the same thing again. We did upgrade him to DTMF and he got to buy the system outright, but the big seller was (As I recall, and I'm a little hazy..) Internal Transfer of an Outgoing call. you could NOT have that feature from NY Tel. To enable it on the switch I had to NOT install a wire wrap jumper. It came standard with the equipment. NY Tel would not supply it because they wanted you to make another (chargeable) outgoing call.

The Bell System did many great things but also many dumb things.

I truly believe that the decision to divestify ATT was spearheaded internally by AT&T brass. From the time the court ordered divestification till implementation took effect was remarkably short. I think if you wanted to break GM up into Chevy, Cady, Buick it would take years. AT&T did it practically overnight. I think Senior management wanted to get rid of the RBOCs. Just my $0.02.

Sam

"Where are we going and why are we in this hand basket?"