TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: The Real Reason Why SBC Won't Work With Vonage on E-911

Re: The Real Reason Why SBC Won't Work With Vonage on E-911

Thor Lancelot Simon (tls@panix.com)
Sat, 2 Apr 2005 07:14:02 UTC

In article <telecom24.141.7@telecom-digest.org>, T. Sean Weintz
<strap@hanh-ct.org> wrote:

> SBC bought out SNET a few years back, and has done NOTHING for us but
> take what WAS good service and make it lousy, while raising prices and
> laying off workers. Back in the monolithic BELL ATT days, things were
> MUCH more reliable than they are now. I'm talking REAL sloppy stuff --
> botched record keeping, service suddenly shifted to a different set of
> pairs on the underground feed for no apparent reasons, etc. etc.

I'm not sure what the "monolithic BELL ATT days" might have been, but
I would just like to point out that Southern New England Telephone
(SNET) was never part of AT&T; it was not a wholly-owned subsidiary
like most other regional operating companies and it was not directly
controlled by AT&T in the same way in which the others were. SNET had
a separate ownership structure and was allowed to use the Bell logo,
but remain at least partially outside the control of the Bell System,
because of some very savvy dealmaking by its founders early on; Bell
needed them more than they needed Bell, and so things were always done
a little bit differently -- just a little bit, but still differently
-- in SNET territory than in the "monolith".

SNET and Cincinnati Bell had more in common in some ways with
Rochester Tel and the other large single-region independents than with
the regional companies that had been absorbed into AT&T. The one way
one could say, though, that they were "monolithic" is that unlike the
pure independents they still bought their switchgear from Western
Electric and generally conformed to operating practices established by
Bell Labs research.

It's not right to talk about what SNET or Cincinnatti Bell did and
draw conclusions about how AT&T was or was not, because those two
Bell companies were not part of AT&T.

Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com

"The inconsistency is startling, though admittedly, if consistency is
to be abandoned or transcended, there is no problem." - Noam Chomsky

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