Well those innovations were all thanks to AT&Ts monopoly status where they didn't have to worry about quarterly reports: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-...

Also Unix was a rogue project because Bell Labs didn't want to fund an OS project after a previous one failed: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birt...

More importantly, it was before the 1980s.

Yes, there is a time and a place for everything: monopolistic telcos did society good in the past. But now is not the time for a lack of competition / oligopoly in the telecommunications industry.

Where did you get the idea I was suggesting that we go backwards?

All I'm saying is that things haven't gotten worse. In fact, they've gotten MUCH BETTER.

Just because the OP hasn't EVER been satisfied with a telco isn't any reason to discount all the good that they do or the progress that's been made.

Some folks forget that cellular companies in the US were fighting an uphill battle against the telcos for a while. The compromise was for an "A" carrier (telco) and a "B" carrier (non-telco). So competition was built into the program for telecom modernization from the start.

Back then, a mobile phone cost $300-$800, service cost $30/month and included no free minutes (priced at $.10-.25) each. It didn't matter which provider you chose because that's what it cost to build the network in a greenfield environment.

And here is the rub: the OP can have almost ANY kind of service he wants. Don't like the incumbent? There are any number of CLECs that will lease you a fiber pair directly to the local colo for 20 years. PROBLEM SOLVED.

You're leaving out a very key point: because of an antitrust case against AT&T, they were forbidden from turning their non-telephone technology into proprietary products. In other words, they were essentially conducting research for the public interest at no real cost to the public.

That's very different from any definition of a 'monopoly' that I'm aware of, and very different from modern network providers.

Many factors were essential to Unix's success, but the fact that it was anything but a monopolized product is certainly one of them.

No cost to the public? Instead of doing research they could have provided better support (or perhaps lower prices) to their actual customers.

Would it have been better ? I'll prefer a company that produces massive advances like these to one that would just provide better service or lower costs for some customers at some point in time.

We had some big advances in France too, when telcos sold telephone for stratospheric prices. Now they still charge too much, but just use their cartel agreements to get more revenue. I know which one I prefer.

Full disclosure : i'm from Europe, so not a real capitalist.

>they could have provided better support (or perhaps lower prices) to their actual customers //

You can level this at any company making a profit. Are you happy with companies making profit? [If so] Well then why not companies using what would be profits on beneficial research.

I guess the problem here is that they are under no legal framework, for what they do with their profits.

ISPs these days I'd have thought would actually be classed as a utility company. Many local governments - even the police are using the Internet for information dissemination. So we are reliant upon it. For me it's a natural replacement, it sure beats wasting reems of paper.

In some ways utility companies should be under tougher regulation. I'd prefer them to be non-profits. But you have to incentivise prospective investors some way. Perhaps social enterprises could fill this space? Profits could be capped at lower levels and positive reinvestment enforced. Quite how though? I am sure money could easily be hemorrhaged through R & D departments, maybe it should go in a general state sponsored science money pot.

Was Ma Bell's support actually bad?

The current company called AT&T obviously has appalling support, but I'm not old enough to have dealt with its previous incarnation.

My grandmother had a phone that she was renting for decades. That phone cost thousands of dollars by the time my mom explained to her that she was allowed to replace it with a purchased phone. AT&T forced people to get their phones from AT&T for decades, until regulation forced them to stop that practice, and even after that they continued to bill people for those phones...often older folks who didn't understand their bills or their rights. That's not poor support, that's evil. Of course, AT&T had a state-sponsored monopoly, so it wasn't all their fault...something about state+corporate cooperation makes everybody involved behave in the worst possible way.

>You might change your mind when you consider that Bell Labs (part of the "Soviet Bureau" you despise) created

Just because bell labs was owned by a telco, doesn't mean they were a telco. A research organization existing under the ownership of a telco company doesn't make telcos provide good service, or have fair prices, or have good customer service.

"Just because bell labs was owned by a telco"

They were able to do that because they were a public utility with guaranteed profits. The stock and earnings were stable ("widow and orphan" money was an expression for people who needed these safe investments). Something important to keep in mind. Really not possible to do that in today's competitive disruptive environment.

Yeah, I completely agree, it's just obviously not possible for companies to do research anymore. Anyone who doesn't see this - I just don't understand how you can fail to.

> obviously not possible for companies to do research anymore

Er, does Google nor do research? apple? IBM? Samsung? My dad worked for a railroad. They did R&D...

I was being sarcastic. I was parroting what I was seeing in the comments of a different story at the time.

I would not be surprised if the 3 net upvotes I got were due to people not appreciating the sarcasm and just being stupid.

IBM isn't a public utility with guaranteed profits, but they do a fair amount of both fundamental and applied research.

IBM has one of the most extensive patent portfolios known to man.

Whatever basic research they do, it's definitely in pursuit of digits for the bottom line.

By the way, MSR was created as an active attempt to recreate an analogue to Bell Labs. It certainly doesn't have anything as foundational to show for it as transistors or lasers, but it's certainly possible for today's big tech companies to do the same kind of work.

You cannot prove that those things would not have come about without Bell Labs. Seeing as Google is doing this, Mozilla is building "Rust", and HP created a memristor, I'm pretty sure a similar list of inventions (transistor, laser, C language, UNIX) would have come out without Bell Labs.