"Bell ran the most efficient ran as a utility which is what it actually was.
They could keep a big enough crew to handle anything that came up"
Well, it depends on how you measure "efficiency". Yes, a dictatorship is a very "efficient" form of government, too.
The Ma Bell that you are so nostalgic over could afford all the overhead they had because they simply rolled it into one big cost and told the government "this is what it costs to run a phone company" and the government let them charge that, plus a margin for profit.
Not only was this bad for the consumer, but it spoiled every single top manager at AT&T - they simply never learned what needed to be done to run a competitive business - That is why former AT&T executives almost to a person have been failures in any post-AT&T executive management position.
Now, as to being able to have crews on standby to fix any problem......Do you know how much phone service would cost today if you had Union CWA workers staffed up to provide the sort of service you envision? It would be staggeringly expensive - service today would rival your mortgage payment if that were allowed to continue.
The AT&T breakup was as necessary as it was inevitable. This reconsolidation will only succeed if they jettison massive numbers of staff, lose the unions and pension obligations, and invest heavily in the technology to stay ahead of smaller, but highly scalable competitors. I doubt that they can pull it off, given where they've come from and the business models they created for themselves, but it will be fun to see them try.
Again like I told someone else try that with your power company and see how screwed up things get. The cost wasn't that much actually as most of them were on service calls. As big as Bell used to be even in the 1950' & 60's & 70's when catastrophic events hit they had to pull crews from other cities to go help out. And there is the maintenance issue. Even buried cable has problems. The cable only has so many aviable pairs to use. I do think this much was lost from the split. I think most places would be on fiber optic now in the cities had the split not happened.
You are enjoying what Bell put in 20 years ago for the most part and not much in the way of advanced technology is going on.
One thing that revolutionized phone service especially in the suburbs and rural are was the development of a small Central Office of sorts called a SLICK System. Most are now at least 20 years old. I live out in the sticks about 12 miles from the central office and on dial up I can get 49 K connects because of the SLICK. But for this to work the cables have to be kept up. The work is not the quality it used to be. How many pieces of Bell equipment do you see now with covers missing etc? The last time my dads line went out they ran a drop wire along the top of a fence row and turned it over to the cable department. They never showed up. I had a tree laying on the cable on my road and called them a few times over several years. They never came. The work from old MA Bell for the most part was quality work.
If you have ever worked in a profession that deals with answering trouble calls you know that equipment failures and other such happenings can not be scheduled. That also meant having workers willing to answer their phone at 2:00am for a call out to go service critical data line services. IF things don't change in the next few years the national phone service grid which in most places is owned by Bell will be in the same condition as Cali's power grid.
One more thing you probably didn't know. MA Bell has to run service to anyone requesting it. They have to eat the cost of getting service up to the home even if it's going up a mountain side with no prior service and for that one customer. As such it is a utility. But then again the local utility can charge you at least for the poles. Bell can't even do that. I should be so lucky the cable company would have to do the same and I finally can get off dial up.