On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 9:21:55 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:26:49 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 6:21:56 AM UTC-5, Randull L. Stephenson wrote:
On 2/10/19 12:27 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
Nothing to do with corporate Kool Ade that AT&T did an immense
amount of innovation long before they were broken up. You dont
get Nobel Prizes for reducing the cost of running exchanges.


If you are using innovation as your metric, Comcast basically decimated AT&T here. Comcast offers gigabit fiber but AT$T only offers 6Mbps Slowverse.
Want TV from Slowverse? Here, nail this fugly dish up on your roof.


Looks to me like the only innovations at American Telegraph are their deceptive marketing lies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...-service-5g-e/


Did Comcast invent the transistor? You're confusing buying and deploying
equipment, being faster to deploy new gear, more willing to invest in
infrastructure, with research and innovation.



They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear. They were trying to get rid of the half
billion relays in their switching equipment.

Were you there? The phone system also had need for amplifiers, just like
a Sony radio. AT&T invested billions in all kinds of research, without
knowing what it would ultimately be used for. They won a Nobel prize for
trapping atoms with a laser, for example. That's pretty far away from
any immediate business need.



It was still to support
the POTS business that they had no real intent on changing.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. I suppose money businesses give to charity is just
to support the current business model, with no intent on changing.
AT&T did change. They deployed electronic switches and laid fiber optic
cable across the country, before there was any internet. They invented
cellular and were deploying it before the break up. Would it have occured
faster with competition, almost certainly yes. But that doesn't take away
from the fact that they were a tech power house that won 8 Nobel prizes,
including the invention of the transistor. You make it sound like they
are some old coal company, that did nothing.







With no
competition, why change a very successful business model?

Who's arguing that?



The innovation I am talking about is what you offer the customer and
from the customer standpoint,

That's fine. It does not make it true that AT&T didn't also spend a
fortune on research, some of which changed the world forever, eg the
transistor. And that research into advanced areas of physics, math,
chemistry, was funded by the monopoly profits. AT&T could have just
handed out as a dividend to the stockholders if they were as greedy and
lazy as you make them sound.





POTS was pretty much the same service
for 80 years. Data was a side line that they grudgingly accepted but
you still had to use their modems and they had no interest in going
faster that 2400 BPS. It wasn't until they unbundled the phone lines
that companies like Paradyne started trellis modulation and got the
bit rate going faster than the baud rate. Then once the consumer
market opened companies like Hayes started modems that didn't cost
more than a car and with the lines unbundled you didn't have to rent
an AT&T coupler to hook it up.

It wasn't just the unbundling. You ignore the other forces that made
all that possible that were also occurring, principally the rapid
advancement of semiconductor technology. You simply couldn't build a 56K
modem in 1970 or 1980 that was economically viable at all because the
semiconductor industry wasn't there yet with the process technology
and manufacturing to support it. The modulation techniques required
digital signal processing and those chips didn't exist yet, nor could
they be fabricated, because they would have been far to complex for
the process technology at the time. It would have taken enough ICs
to fill a cabinet and cost $50K. All that had to advance, and it
wasn't driven primarily by telecom, it was driven by all the uses of ICs, collectively, across all markets, in all the world. Once the fabs to
support the required transistor density evolved, then that cabinet
could fit into a small modem that cost $200.