12 Dec
2017
12 Dec
'17
6:27 a.m.
I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another
element. It was simply an element of faith that to send voice you
needed to have a guaranteed rate of speed. Thus the interest in
time-division multiplexing. Deeply built into the Bell System
mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is
good service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they
didn't let you make a call. But the ones that got through ran with
no problems...
Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people
in Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my
call. For "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to
fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody else. Maybe the
best solution is two networks...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc(a)ccc.com>
To:
"Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com [1]>
wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com [2]> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people
misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what
they wanted.
AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were
willing to trade
their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective,
it worked.
For the
rest of us, not so good.
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground
To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown
and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (_i.e._ large
systems) and Paul's right, they missed.
But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data
centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent
decree we going to keep them from being players in it.
To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was
centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it
worked, it was fine.
But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was
a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to
build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the
phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way.
IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which
was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so
many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was
going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was
formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to
win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of
networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing
work.
So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T,
Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not
find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before.
What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I
do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T
would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM,
ISDN, et al).
My 2 cents....
Clem
Links:
------
[1] mailto:paul.winalski@gmail.com
[2] mailto:jon@fourwinds.com