Ma Bell
You’ve Come a Long Way Baby
The headlines in today’s Honolulu Advertiser announced:
“Hawaiian Telcom Files For Bankruptcy”
“One Ringy Dingy…”
I’m sure that I date myself when recalling the days that Lily Tomlin portrayed that hard core woman working at the Phone Company who had full control over your communication. Deregulation changed everything. As a monopoly, the one and only Phone Company thrived. But when things became competitive we saw numerous phone companies now in competition with one another. The Carlyle Group in Washington D.C. acquired Hawaiian Telcom in 2005 from Verizon Communications Inc. They did it with borrowed money, and have now chosen to file for Chapter 11 protection rather than pay the bill.
“Hi Mom”
The once powerful Phone Company has taken hard hits from its own offspring; the cell phone. Along with free enterprise comes competition, and there’s few industries more cometitive today than cell phone companies. Innovation is on the fast track and I don’t see how the old phone companies will ever be able to keep up. I see more and more people opting to use cell phones as their principle at home phone, and then there’s Skype, where you can talk free over your computer. I haven’t paid for a long distance call since getting it. Watching this all play out is going to be very interesting.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Greed loses out again; Yeah!
December 1st, 2008 at 6:00 pm
This is pretty sad when I stop to think about it. All of those years, all that history, all for nothing. Oh well, I guess we call that progress. I have to admit, I love my cell phone.
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 am
I still have a hard line with a speakerphone but all my cordless phones keep going out and I have to change phones. Tell us about your Skype. Is is expensive and hard to install? I love the idea, Very Epcot Tomorrowland!
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:56 am
Ron, Yes-you are right! Skype is wonderful, easy to use, and it frees up my cell phone for other incoming business calls. In Ron Speak, “It’s Easy!”
My land line went out the window a year ago when I found a dependable and reliable fax service. Faxes go directly to my computer, and clients dial an 800 number to send them, how easy is that?
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:55 am
Yeah, i use faxage and it works great, no fuss and no muss! customers fax on a 800 # and i get on my computer and can print out or just read it. pretty cool! As far as htelcom, they are a mess, i think a utility co should not be able to file chapter 11, they should go down and let the utility go up for bid. i am tired of bailouts, let the dust settle and let free enterprise take over, we have too much govt intervention. they can regulate, but failed miserably by allowing these mortgage based securites to be legal as of 2000, which is back room betting, and is the reason for this economic situation, not just the mortgages with arm rates. people invested 7 trillion dollars on mortgage backed securities, and when the arm situation and loose lending to anyone hit the fan, those securities investments really were worse than the fraudulent mortgages. anyway, govt is supposed to regulate intelligently and they are incapable of doing anything right. i say let htelcom take it in the shorts and let someone else take over. they did get hosed BTW by verizon who took all their computers and databases etc, leaving htelcom in the dark totally, not sure how that should have happened, but it did. everyone almost had severe billing errors from htelcom, they never admitted that until the end, and folks had so much frustration that they did not care, and that is when folks bailed in droves from htelcom, myself included.