sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Why didn't AT&T adopt Alaska and Hawaii?

This is more of a curiosity question than anything. Why didn't AT&T establish Bell operating companies in Alaska and Hawaii? They had a presence in every other state in the Union, and held the majority of operating territories in many states. They even established Bell Canada in a joint venture.

General Telephone (later GTE) took all of Hawaii, which I assume was because they already had a big chunk of coastal Southern California and they were the closest American telco with any money to venture into uncharted territory.

AT&T obviously had a major presence with their Pacific Bell Telephone operations in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco though. Were they just not interested in Hawaii?

Alaska ended up being served by a bunch of no-name co-ops for the most part. Granted, there was AT&T Alascomm, but I don't think that they ever operated as an LEC. I think they were more of a long-haul transport provider back to the mainland. RCA played a big part in bringing telephone service to remote areas with their radiotelephone systems and I think that these companies morphed into the LEC serving the larger cities.

Does anyone know anything about the history of this?

Ed -

Somewhere I have a history of GTE. I'll see if it says anything.

Sam

Too many bad cable pairs!

I would guess it had to do with money, and the inability to make it in those locations.

It's probably still hard for a LEC to make money in most parts of Alaska. Hawaii, maybe, but with so many islands I'm sure AT&T's margins would have been way lower than the other 48 states.

Ed -

From what I've been able to find out, Hawaii Bell Telephone was the first phone company in the Islands but was thrown out for bad service. Then a private company (Hawaii Telephone) was established. In the mid '60s ITT (who had been supplying equipment to HT put in a bid to take it over. The president of HT hated Harold Geneen, president of ITT and solicited a bid from GTE. The deal was approved by the boards of both HT and GTE and went through in '67.

As far as Alaska, GTE I found less information. GTE had already acquired some Canadian Telephone companies (BC and Quebec) and had large parts of California. The state government felt that Alaska needed a major presence to tie together its collection of small independent companies and GTE was perhaps more......amenable then AT&T? Also GTE had a major subsidiary (Lenkurt) that produced very high end transmission equipment - including some top microwave products - something that Alaska Telecom used excessively.

I'll keep looking.

Sam

Thanks, Sam. I do recall Hawaiian Telephone becoming GTE Hawaiian Telephone, so obviously a telco existed there before and was taken over by GTE. I did not realize that Bell had ever ventured there, but I'm sure that it was a half hearted effort if they got kicked out. I've never heard of a Bell company being kicked out.

We had a tiny hamlet here in Virginia (the town of Gore)on the far northwestern fringe of the state that was served by GTE. This is likely due to the fact that GTE had a fairly large presence in eastern West Virginia (Shepherdstown and Charles Town) which was right across the state line. Ironically, Gore was surrounded by a county that was served entirely by Bell(C&P Telephone of VA, later Bell Atlantic and now Verizon). Gore was the only territory in Virginia that was served by GTE, since most of the independent territories in VA were owned by Continental Telephone (later Contel) or UTS-United Inter-Mountain Telephone Company.

The town of Gore ended up voting GTE out and the town was enveloped into the surrounding Bell territory, supposedly because of poor service. This occurred in the early 1980s. Bell came in and ripped down all aerial and underground plant and replaced it. It was quite a controversial undertaking to say the least. Later on, GTE bought Contel's markets and Bell Atlantic bought GTE's markets, becoming Verizon. Thirty years later, Gore is right back where they started. What a circle of events, huh?

I also recall that United Telephone System (UTS) had some presence in Alaska, likely in the larger cities. Since UTS is long gone and now under the CenturyLink umbrella (after becoming Sprint, then Embarq), they too must have been dropped at some point along the line.

You're probably right about GTE being more amenable to taking over independent territories in Alaska, since they were more willing to play different tunes and adopt independents' policies and practices, where Bell was more of a 'rip it out and do it our way' company. It was all Bell standards or nothing, as mentioned earlier with Gore, VA.

Incidentally, did you know that there's one (ONE) independent telco on Long Island, NY? Yep, it's an island off of the north shore called Fishers Island ( TelcoData's Information ). Interesting, huh?

I'm not sure why any of this is of interest to me, but it is.

Ed -

Re' bad service - a few items:

- GTE was pushing steppers for years before Bell, who were actively opposed to the idea of the customer dialing their own numbers

- My buddy in Powell Tennessee's father-in-laws family owned the local Independent Telco for generations. People down there wanted nothing to do with Bell (according to him, anyway) because his family provided better service (including dial phones decades before Bell)

- In NYC in the late '60s and early '70s telephone service was HORRENDOUS. Personal experience (Arthur, feel free to chime in with the other side). NY Tel wanted to put in Picturephone service and the PSC refused to allow them to introduce ANYTHING new until they cleaned up their act. I personally waited 6 months for telephone service. Every week an installer would come by and drop off a card saying "Be back next week. No cable." Being an Intercom, PAX and PA installer, I assumed this meant No cable in the locker. After a month of taking off work or school or arranging for someone to house sit, I finally got pissed and demanded to talk to a customer service supervisor. They left me on hold for 40 minutes till everyone went home for the day. When a cleaning woman picked up the blinking light and got an earful from me, she got the Night Repair foreman on the line who explained that 'No cable" meant "No spare pairs" in the feeder. There was no scheduled date in the next five years to pull new service. (I eventually got service when someone died and I bribed an Installer to get her pair). At this time also NY Tel went on a campaign to hire the unemployable. My buddy who was a Splicing foreman at the time said that on payday he would have to go to the bank with one of his crew, so he could countersign their check while they "made their mark (X)'. Do you think they could read a splicing drawing? He said he left Bell when he was spending more time in the manholes as a foreman then he spent as a craftsman.

- In 1973 I worked for a firm that examined telephone bills for corporate customers looking for refunds. 90% were wrong - almost always in Bell's favor.

Believe me, if NYC could have thrown out Bell at that time, they would have.

Just my $0.02

Sam

RCA Globecom provided all the uplink and satellite equipment for Alaska. I worked for them for a short time. The story I heard was that it was too expensive to provide service to so few people so none of the "brand name LECs" were interested. RCA was itching to get VSAT off the ground and Alaska was immediately interested in having ANYTHING in the remote villages, so that is why RCA Globecom was, essentially, the LEC for Alaska for a while. I think when Hughes stole Globecom from RCA they immediately sold the service to whatever became LECs in Alaska.

The story of bad service from Bell Telephone in New York is diametrically opposite of what happened in PA. Western PA, at one time, had more independent telephone companies than any other state. At one time, PA was headquarters for the Independent Telephone Association.

For the most part, the independents didn't have deep pockets, so stepper equipment was still working well into the late 70s. Bell was installing #5 crossbar from the early 50s into the mid 60s when Bell started to replace the crossbars with some variant of the #1AESS. None of the independents could offer the services Bell Telephone was providing. Bell provided all the LATA connections and made the independents actually connect or be isolated from the rest of the world. I know of none of the independents that did not comply.

In Western PA, Bell Telephone was king and every other company wanted to be like Mother. From the end of WWII to the mid 70s, Bell Telephone was the greatest and best telephone company in Pennsylvania. Things have changed!

Rcaman

Bell Canada was actually booted out of some Canadian provinces because of bad service.

Here in Manitoba the provincial govt bought it out in 1908 and turned it into a Crown corporation before turning it into a private company in 2006.

To the west in Saskatchewan the government did the same thing in 1908 but they still operate it as a Crown Corp.

I had always thought that in New York it was only the business customers that had bad service back in the 60-70's. I did not realize that residential was also as bad.