Originally Posted by WhiteS2k' date='Feb 3 2005, 05:33 PM

When AT&T was still intact, we had Bell Labs that did a lot of the research, anything from basic research to tele-communications (the transistor was invented by Bell Labs, the Unix operating system, the modem, and so on). Can you point to any of the Bell children and say they are doing the equivalent research as what Bell Labs did? Without the backing of AT&T, Bell Labs (which got spun off as part of Lucent Technologies) is struggling to survive.

The technologies you cited: call waiting, caller id, call block, etc., were all invented by AT&T back when it was still together, they just never had a chance to put it into the market place yet. Yes, I'd agree the smaller companies accelerated the deployment of some of the technologies. But advances in technology will happen even if AT&T was not broken up. Now the CLEC / RBOC companies are too busy trying to make a buck to compete with the other companies that they don't have any time to do any research.

Now that you have brought it up, I wonder who is going to drive the next wave of research for the US? IBM is still doing it, but Xerox is struggling and thinking of spinning off PARC. HP has their HP-Labs, but much smaller scale than Bell Labs. Microsoft is a joke when it comes to basic research. Most of the university research in the US was done by foreign students; but after 9/11, the foreign student population has declined significantly. So the break-up of Ma Bell signalled the decline of the US leadership in innovation.

Originally Posted by VoIPA' date='Feb 4 2005, 01:41 PM

Telecommunication advances in the US are not driven by the carrier, rather by companies like Cisco, Alcatel, etc. that develop new technologies to sell to the competing phone providers.

RBOCs and CLECs have no need to carry out research and development with so many others providing what Bell Labs used to.