I was an original MCI employee back when it was called Microwave Communications Incorporated. We didn't have any switches just private lines from St.Louis to Chicago and Wash DC to New York via Philly.
I'll never forget being at the Philly 1 terminal and having Sheriff deputies knocking on the door demanding entrance to repossess equipment prior to the consent decree.
We called Worthington the General Counsel in DC to ask what we should do. His response, whatever you do don't open the door. We told the deputies under counsels advisement that we were prohibited form opening the door and they went away.
If we had let them in, MCI would have been finished....
NeverGore :^)
1. That is an awesome story about Philly1
2. If MaBell had her way, if it weren't for MCI, we'd still be renting our handset and paying through the nose for long distance calls.
3. The largest cell provider is Verizon (formerly, Bell Atlantic, formerly C&P Telephone, formerly AT&T -- MABELL)
MCI has almost always had crappy management. Just before I left there, somebody noticed that there were no outages over the holidays... gee, because nobody was doing any work! Instead of paying enough money to keep the good people and dumping the idiots they recruited from bagging groceries, their response was not to allow any work that *might* affect traffic during business hours. Retarded managers who screwed up got promoted or transferred to make somebody else's life miserable because firing an idiot butt-kisser would look like a reversal of a Custer Decision. Over 6 years I saw just about every bad management cliche there was. No surprise to me.
wow!
whatta story.
most people don't remember the monopoly of at&t. it was illegal to hook up alien equipment to your phone line.