Remember when ....

When I first moved to Mexico in 1978, private line monthly residential phone service from Southwestern Bell was $9 a month. At the time, residential phone services were being subsidized by business customers to make phone service affordable for the consumer.

Once the breakup of AT&T started in 1984, the cost of phone service shot up fairly quickly. In my case, residential phone service went from $9 a month to $20+ a month, and eventually higher than that. No longer could AT&T leverage business customers as a way to provide affordable residential phone service. I always thought President Ronald Reagan was responsible for the breakup of AT&T, but that process had actually started much earlier:  the Bell System divestiture, or the breakup of AT&T, was initiated by the filing in 1974 by the U.S. Department of Justice of an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T.

Prior to 1984, there was only one company providing long distance services nationwide:  AT&T. There, too, residential rates were offset by AT&T's business customers. Before the breakup there was no "choosing" a long distance carrier - there was no plethora of long distance rates to wade through - we just had long distance services from "the phone company" and they worked.

At the time of the breakup, the government portrayed the breakup as being good for consumers - no longer would AT&T be a monopoly. I remember Southwestern Bell (in fact all of the Bell operating companies) as far back as 1970 using the slogan, "We may be the only phone company in town, but we try not to act like it," playing on the fact that the phone company knew it was a monopoly.

Was the breakup good for consumers? It's safe to say, "of course not". Residential phone services went up in price, long distance charges went up in price and business phone services went up in price. Thank you Feds for really screwing up phone service costs in America.

Prior to the breakup, radio stations frequently used a "phone loop" for things like remotes from a distant location. A phone loop had no dial tone, it was basically a pair of audio lines from point A to point B. Locally phone loops were used to provide a daily broadcast from the Central Missouri Livestock Auction, as well as rotate among churches in the ministerial alliance for a Sunday morning live church service broadcast.

A phone loop was something on the order of $25 a month prior to 1984. But then came the breakup of AT&T, and suddenly that same phone loop was going to cost $250 a month. The station could no longer afford to provide the phone loop as part of its broadcast service and the Sunday morning church service broadcast became history.

Phone lines were routinely installed and uninstalled for broadcasts like ballgames prior to 1984, because it was an affordable and cost effective way to bring distant games to the local radio audience. Those costs went up and quickly stations were scrambling to find alternate ways to provide remote broadcasts.

At the station here, a thousand foot tower was constructed in 1985 - a major upgrade for the station. As part of that construction, a Marti remote broadcast system - using VHF/UHF frequencies to send remote audio over long distances - was included with the new tower.

Marti remote broadcast systems had actually been around for quite a while at that point, larger stations used them to provide studio quality audio from remote broadcasts - providing sound quality that was not possible over phone lines or loops.

That Marti antenna was put 800' up the tower here to provide about a 75 mile radius for remote broadcasts, IF you could get the remote broadcast antenna up high enough and pointed in the right direction.

Eventually (around 1990) the station here installed a 40' telescoping mast in the station van, to aid in broadcasting from remote locations. That system was wonderful when it worked - but if you were covering any very long distance - it became a matter of IF the system would work from point A to point B.

One year, there were remote broadcasts from the Warren County Fair to the studios in Mexico via that Marti system. The following year, when the weather was different, the Marti system did not work over that great a distance. The year after that, I believe the system worked from there - so we never knew whether it would or wouldn't work until we tried it.

Once we started hitting more remote areas where the system wouldn't work, and with the high cost of maintaining that telescoping mast, the station soon moved to cellular phone service for remote broadcasts.

Over time, things like the breakup of AT&T, and later the consolidation of broadcast companies and  consolidation in other industries have been portrayed as being "good for consumers". In hindsight, we know better.

So is it any wonder, one of the most terrifying phrases you may ever hear is: "Hi, we're from the government, and we're here to help!". :)

So it goes.