The coax networks that GP refers to have nothing to do with cable television (except that television syndication links were carried over them). GP is referring to the AT&T L-series carriers which carried telephone calls (and later digital voice link equivalents) over multiple bundled coaxial pairs.

The L-carrier infrastructure was built to remarkable standards of durability and reliability, in part because much of the system (particularly L-3I and L-4) were built as part of federal C3I contracts and were hardened against limited nuclear strikes, but also because of AT&T/WECo's general culture of obsession with reliability. Station equipment would be entirely duplicated for redundancy, nearly all equipment stations were manned to allow for quick repair (and 'maintenance patrols' inspected remote en-route repeaters as often as daily), and the system was designed for network-level redundancy through rerouting and the preparation of 'alternate control points' to allow continued operation even in the case of complete isolation of parts of the network.

The L-carrier system fell out of use when it was replaced by fiber-optic technology (which AT&T initially referred to as "lightguide", perhaps due to it coming hot on the tails of their work on waveguide carriers such as WT4 which were essentially microwave radio through a metal duct).

Of course, this raises the question of why this infrastructure is so much more reliable than cable television seems to be. I would suggest three explanations. First, AT&T, Bell Labs, WECo, and the rest of the Ma Bell crowd held reliability as an extremely high value, at both a cultural and requirements level. This is exemplified by now legendary Bell system feats such as moving exchange office buildings with operators still working inside (and dragging long tether cables) in order to avoid a service interruption. Second, AT&T long held major defense contracts with significant reliability requirements (against both natural conditions and enemy attack), and as a matter of cost savings these contracts were met using infrastructure shared with civilian services. In general, the non-Bell system modern internet carriers have not held this type of business on such a large scale, in part because they postdate the cold war and in part because AT&T, CenturyLink, and other Bell alums are more interested in federal contracts.

Third, cable television has historically been both more competitive and less critical in popular opinion than telephone service, and so reliability has simply not been a high business priority for these operators. For the Bell system any service interruption could be a major scandal, and this is still to some extent true today of telephone service (see any 911 interruption incident). On the other hand the cable companies descended from offering a service which was viewed as a non-critical luxury. Consumer and regulator behavior seems to have just not caught up to the internet era in this regard.

And yes, it is quite true that many of the Bell system alums are struggling today. On the other hand, CenturyLink is quite viable as a business and shows few signs of slowing. They are even arguably relatively innovation-forward as an ISP as evidenced by their having one of the larger gigabit GPON footprints in the US, as well as emphasizing no-contract "price for life" service in many markets where they compete with cable carriers. But yes, ultimately most of the Bell system has been dismantled in the interest of cost savings, and has been replaced by a sort of shambling wisp of its former self. Many feel that the writing was on the wall as soon as the breakup occurred, a move which was in good part aimed at reducing consumer prices, and did so, but partially at the cost of radically reduced investment in infrastructure. There is tradeoff between affordability and reliability, and the telecom industry seems to always cling to one of two extremes.

Part of their monopoly was regulation. Those reliability requirements were mandated by state utility boards and the FCC. The engineering culture was the tail that wagged the dog.

Yes, and I think it's an important example of "reason number three" that while cable television operators are subject to public utility regulation in most states they are not subject to nearly as stringent quality-of-service requirements as the telephone operators. You can complain to your PRC or equivalent body about nearly any interruption of telephone service, but when it comes to your cable you're largely on your own.

Very true.

In my experience in New York, Verizon basically uses the public service commission as a level-1 helpdesk -- they take referrals incredibly seriously. I had an issue with Verizon equipment infested with bees -- and they literally rolled trucks within 30 minutes of getting a referral from the regulator, a pole and a bunch of equipment was replaced within 24 hours.

With TWC/Spectrum, unless they do something grossly incompetent or unsafe, the regulator is more like another party nagging them.

As a bit of very purely My Opinon on the matter, I have always felt that there is great significance to the connection between the Bell system and Manifest Destiny. In the classic book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner argues that the American drive towards irrigation agriculture in the West must be viewed not as a practical matter but as a religious one, both on the obvious level that a large part of the movement (e.g. the Bureau of Reclamation) descended from the Mormons (cough LDS) for which it quite literally was a religious value, and on the deeper level that the government pursued irrigation projects with great gusto when they made absolutely no economic sense, and the government knew that---so there must be something deeper driving the efforts.

I would view the telephone system through a similar lens. The famous painting "American Progress," frequently used to illustrate school lessons on manifest destiny, depicts not only the tide of pioneers headed west but, even more prominently, an angel stringing telegraph wire. This connection between the telegraph (and later telephone) and manifest destiny, and between the telegraph and deity, does not seem incidental.

It was a widely held opinion through the late 19th and early 20th century that instantaneous communication through the telegraph and telephone was a fundamental component of civilizing the nation, key to American progress. It was closely coupled with the railroads in that regard, both in the spiritual sense that both opened the West to reclamation (which at the time had a meaning more like exploitation, in the sense of natural resources), and in the practical sense that the early telegraph system was often operated by railroads.

So, perhaps at some basic level, there is a fundamental difference between the telephone system and the cable television system: the telephone system is an artifact of an era of unbounded American expansion and optimism, and so was founded with a strong sense of the "American values" of exceptional quality and dedication to purpose. The cable television system, on the other hand, only came to fruition in the 1950s, by which point it was coming of age in a post-war America in which capitalism was held as a greater value than expansionism and exceptionalism, manifest destiny having in good part died with the tremendous shock of the great depression.

Just something to think about when you consider how history drives technology today.

Very interesting observations, thanks for sharing.

Can you share any continuation of thoughts into the present and near future?

It's hard for me to see what is driving current "tech" culture. I'm loath to even call it that because so much of it is not really tech but attempts to hack business or regulatory processes, often without regard for ethics or social impact. "hacking" sounds like a better term than "tech" for most "exciting startups" right now.

See, I don't know, and I like to think that if I did I'd write a famous book about it or something, but it's just hard to say. On the one hand, it's a bit unfair of me to sort of present it as "post WWII capitalism ruined everything," even if only in the idealist sense that I'm a leftist and would generally maintain that capitalism always ruined everything. But also in the real sense that, while the Bell system (like the railroads) was very wrapped up in this spiritual American ideal of expansion, it also served the primary purpose of making a few founders and investors extremely rich. It's not like enriching the shareholders was invented in 1950.

On the other hand, it's hard not to feel like there is something qualitatively different about the barons (and their businesses) of the 19th to early 20th century and what we have today. Consider some of the great business empires of the early 20th century - General Electric, Standard Oil, the AT&SF... They were viewed as practically synonymous with the American ideal (a view which is clearly myopic in consideration of e.g. their treatment of labor, but which I think was nonetheless widely held). Then look at some of our biggest companies today... The FAANG companies, but also Wal-Mart, the oil companies... almost as a rule they are mired in controversy and entangled in politics in a way that is far more publicly visible than the (equally deep) entanglement of earlier companies.

Perhaps the first part is the, well, bad part: major industries in the early 20th century were, broadly speaking, not at all above bribing government officials and pulling of remarkably dastardly schemes to get legislation and policy changed in their favor. But it seems like this generally played out outside of the public view and was often only discovered later. On the other hand, modern tech companies are still assaulting the law head-on but do it in an extremely public way, more or less using their customers as the ammunition. They're just much more visibly scofflaws. Part of this might reflect simple power dynamics... Uber no longer needs to bring in the Pinkertons to quash a labor revolt, they can basically just say "no" and apply a little sedition and they get their way due to scale. Not to say that I think they're necessarily above putting down a strike by force, but it's 2020 - the strike will never happen in the first place [you might detect that I am a leftist, but a cynical one].

I think a big part of the picture though has to do with the modern financial ecosystem. Most of the titans of old were associated with a prominent founder, and most of them were just as much big personalities as Steve Jobs. It's somewhat amusing to see the discussion of "fake news" as such a modern phenomena when newspaper giant W. R. Hearst had a nearly national fleet of papers publishing exclusively his own opinions for decades. Just in the telephone system, Bell was not only an important inventor but also a very rabid advocate of some downright detestable viewpoints - he was a big supporter of compulsory sterilization of the poor. You might call him sort of a Peter Thiel of his day, although I'm not sure which of those two I'm being more unkind to with that comparison.

We still have this kinds of big personalities today, bizarre opinions and temper tantrums to boot (Elon Musk provides enough drama to make up for a dozen sane "founders"). But with limited exceptions even with multi-class stock and bizarre ownership schemes and all I just don't think they have the kind of single-handed power over their companies that was common a century ago. This has a tendency to push all companies towards behavior that is desirable for the investors rather than desirable for the founders. On top of that, there's sort of an odd split-brained system where, in the tech industry, investors tend to be broadly split into institutional investors that buy into established companies and want stability and growth (e.g. turning Google more and more away from a quirky tech company and into another Oracle), and venture capitalists, Masayoshi Son a particularly dramatic example, who are playing by their own rulebooks that for the most part emphasize growth above all else. Growth has always been desirable for companies but at a degree it becomes pathological, and venture capital seems engineered to push companies to this point as rapidly as possible.

Cyrus Holliday of the AT&SF was a founder and, like many of the time and many today, also a politician. His investors were many but they were largely looking for growth that was steady rather than exponential. Railroads in general "disrupted" transportation but no one at the time was looking at it that way, and many of the decisions made (such as the land grant arrangement) were very much long-term plays rather than short-term ones---aimed towards building a physical empire, not merely a large customer base. Really my point is, though, Holliday and his successors were basically trusted to make decisions on their own with comparatively little pressure from investors (who couldn't even practically be involved day to day because it took time for news to travel), and through a slow, plodding approach to growth they more or less made the anglo Southwest from whole cloth.

Investors today just don't seem to do that kind of thing... they either want exponential growth with almost no concern paid to other issues (where users go, the money will follow, they seem to think, although centuries of experience have shown that this is not a safe assumption), or they want to stabilize their portfolio by getting businesses to act just like all of the others. While the "tech community" has a real obsession with charismatic founders, it seems like the success of companies is more or less correlated with how little power the founder actually wields. WeWork imploded while SpaceX has given Elon Musk a play set to keep him busy while they do the actual work. Once tech companies reach a certain size the undergo a slow and very awkward transition from one to the other, more or less once they reach the point where exponential growth is no longer possible because they already count just about everyone in several continents as a customer.

All just my opinions, but there they are.