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Comment by 72deluxe | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating and informative! Thanks!

I had no idea it was this bad, as I am from the UK.

It was almost that bad in pretty much all European countries too. Including the UK. Prior to the start of deregulation in 1981 you could only rent your phone from BT, and BT/the Post Office had sole authority to decide what could be attached to the network.

Starting from 1981, standardized sockets were introduced to allow people to buy and attach third party equipment, and BSI took over the responsibility for setting the standards for what equipment could be attached.

(And you can still rent your phone from BT if you prefer: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/13012/~/is-it... )

Ah I was born mid80s so grew up after the deregulation. My brother once moved into a flat where the previous tenant had rented their phone from BT but moved without telling them, leading to many threatening letters from BT regarding the phone.

One thing I am surprised about these days is how RUBBISH home phones are. Given the advances in cheap mobile phone technology and the finishes/quality even on cheap devices, home phones still feel like toys and have abysmal quality and no features - I would love to pair a bluetooth headset to a base station and wander around but apparently this is entirely beyond the normal use patterns envisioned by manufacturers. It's very frustrating - I almost want to go back to a 1980s polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride rotary phone.

The opposite use case is covered. They do make base stations you can pair with your cell phone as a bluetooth headset.

It depends on your definition of "bad." The Ma Bell monopoly certainly constrained your ability to even hook your own equipment to their wiring for many years and resulted in an uncompetitive market in terms of pricing. Even intra-state long distance was very expensive by today's standards. (Though some of that was a function of the technology economics as well.) On the other hand, it just worked. US telephone service was extremely reliable.

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