In the early 80s, anger was brewing towards a rebellion against Ma Bell. Before the settlement in 1982 with the US Government vs. AT&T, AT&T was in court with the infamous 1974 suit against the company with its control of everything, from its Long Lines (Long Distance), to Western Electric, the local Bell Operating Companies and so on. The opposition hated the company because they felt AT&T thought because the
Around that same time, a series that ran on PBS in the early 80s called Enterprise did an episode on the more fun stuff, the technological issues with the monopoly. The people who had a beef were people who hated or loathed AT&T equipment or services.
In 1968, the infamous case brought to the FCC that disrupted the telephony industry was the Carterphone ruling. The Carterphone was the first ever cordless phone, and prior to 1968, no one could have any phone other than a Western Electric phone leased by your local Bell operating company. (In fact one of the reasons why the phones were so damn reliable, was to keep the operating costs down to sustain their monopoly – which actually wasn’t bad – except if you were in the Carterphone camp.) The Bell System would threaten customers if they were using non Bell System equipment cutoff of services. In other resources, the Bell System allegedly would monitor customer’s voltage to see if they were using Bell equipment or not. Too bad there wasn’t an ACLU around at that time!
The lawyers for the Carterphone were not your highest quality legal team, because many lawyers didn’t feel it would be worth it to put the Bell System into court. The oddball lawyer, coming from a small town was laughed at big time by the big Bell System legal team. They would attack like a prosecutor by cross examining the AT&T executive and compare it to a speakerphone as this lawyer explains:
http://www.youtube.com/ceA2hYeqQ6E?t=7m39s
The administrative judge was totally taken aback, and realized that AT&T really didn’t want anything but their own products in their own customers hands. As the lawyer describes, the judge felt it was illogical, unreasonable for the bell exec to answer that way.
The Carterphone Decision (whether it was for the better or for the worse) opened up the market for lower cost equipment and third-party equipment to come, as the clip above mentioned from PBX, to KTS systems and answering machines alike.
One example was the head of MCI, who thought there could be competition in a growing market called the long distance market; he compared it to that one couldn’t fight AT&T like one can’t fight city hall.