Ok, off topic, but AT&T breakup was good. Didn't actually lower prices, but services sprouted like weeds. For 100 years, a simple desktop landline (2 different models! Black or green!) turned into the explosion of products and services we have today.
The AT&T breakup happened after sprint et al started offering long distance services.
The carterfone decision, which happened before that, is what gave us phone choice.
There was some post-breakup price-reduction in local services, but they all came from the local monopolies that were the result of the AT&T breakup. The services themselves, with the exception of caller-id, were offered by pre-breakup AT&T but were more expensive. Since the land-line service price decline happened when cell-phone carriers started offering those same services for less, I think that cell-phone competition gets the credit, not the breakup.
And beige was available before green. (I think that white was as well.)
> I'd think cell-phones themselves came to life post-ATT monopoly.
I thought that I said that.
> That whole industry was part of the windfall.
How so? Are you claiming that AT&T would have been granted a cell-phone monopoly if it hadn't been broken up? If so, why weren't the baby bells, which still had a land-line monopoly, given a cell phone monopoly?
I think that the success of sprint et al wrt long distance by the time that cell-phones were taking off pretty much guaranteed that there AT&T wouldn't be granted a cell phone monoply even if the break-up hadn't occurred.
