The Troubled History of the RBOCs
When I took my first Telecom class in college, I learned about the 8 RBOCs or Regional Bell Operating Companies being set up after the AT&T monopoly was ended.
My teacher said although they were all former “Bells”, they had no joint interest. However, I wasn’t so sure. At that time, they had already begun to buy each other and were down from 8 to 4:
- SBC (Ameritech and Southwestern Bell and Pacific Telesis)
- Verizon (GTE and Bell Atlantic and NYNEX)
- BellSouth
- Qwest (US West)
I had a scary premonition that day that this would keep up until there was again 1 company, or at least 2 companies with a joint interest…
And wouldn’t you know it, SBC aquired and changed its own name to AT&T, which then bought BellSouth (down to 3), and Verizon bought MCI for good measure.
Thats scary enough, but it I never even thought about cellular. You see, if we back up to before the SBC merger:
- Cingular (owned by Bell South and SBC {no joint interest???}) bought AT&T wireless, changing it all to Cingular and creating the largest cellular network in the USA
- Then SBC bought Bell South and AT&T, and that whole mess becomes AT&T Inc
- Finally AT&T bought Cingular back!
Confused yet? Thats ok. On top of all that mess, AT&T sold its unprofitable Rural New England operations to Fairpoint (pending approval).
The bottom line: I’m scared about when this will end, and if my premonition about the 1 or 2 final Telecom giants ruling the USA will come to pass, leaving us all with crappy service and soaring rates due to a lack of competition. Of some comfort is the fact that I can switch to VoIP for land-line service, use small-company DSL or cable from the big evil Time-Warner, and have a little choice in cellular too.
The whole thing that brought this up is the fact that I was telling B about how AT&T bought Cingular back, and he pointed out that the Colbert Report had just done an explanation that both out-does mine, and is funny as hell (as usual). So if my explanation confuses you (hell it confuses me), See the slightly less in-depth video here.
UPDATE: Sadly the video has been taken down by Viacom. I can’t seem to find a replacement anywhere…
Nyrath the nearly wise 7:44 pm on 2/16/2007 Permalink
When your aunt Patti and I read about something like that, our code phrase is “It’s just like Rollerball!”. In the original movie, corporate mergers have gotten so bad that there are only five corporations on the planet. They have names like “Energy”, “Food”, “Entertainment.”