From FB group Bell Telephone… Oct 29, 30
to Ronald Cooper
Yeah, Touchtone is an excellent example of AT&T’s holding back technology. Besides the customer paying them for a service that benefitted AT&T more, making the customer pay so much ($1.20 a month, when my phone bill was $10 to $15 a month), they gave the customer the ‘option’ of not having the service, which meant that the technology really was held back. See back then you had no choice as to what phone you had installed. If you chose to save $1.20 a month and not have Touchtone, then Ma Bell installed a rotary dial phone. This meant that *no service* could be universally implemented! The other services we take for granted today could not be implemented because only a fraction of the telco customers had Touchtone. The list is endless! VM, Answering Machines, Tellerphone banking, other forms of banking, many, many other services such as Rx reordering, and the Big One that stabs at the heart of AT&T’s Cash Cow, the long distance phone cards. It’s obvious that AT&T was trying to keep those from siphoning away their LD business. I remember when Radio Shack, et al, sold Touchtone dialers to hold against the mouthpiece. So in reality, AT&T never was willing to play on a level playing field. “Have it our way, not your way.”
I had no intention of any political inference. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘even without competition.’ AT&T was subject to tariffs, like the competition. Tariffs were a double-edged sword. They forced competition to charge the same price for a service thereby eliminating pressure to compete on price. The consumer was paying $50 for a 1 hour call to another area code only 30 miles away. Now my whole phone bill is only $35 a month, with nationwide free long distance. That was not the way AT&T wanted it, and it was due to competition.
BTW, I heard that T-Mobile and Sprint are trying to merge.
