Word: breakups
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Many Americans seem to feel dismay over the whole breakup and are irritated by changes that are mainly small but still inconvenient. Says retired Salesman Jack Reiss, 83, of Harrisburg, Pa.: "I don't know why they broke up Ma Bell, but I wish they would put it back together." Concurs Larry Mixon, district manager for Southern Bell in Florida: "Human beings don't like change. They have a problem adjusting...
...shareholders will get a chance to voice their opinions on divestiture in Milwaukee this week at the company's first annual meeting since the breakup. Stockholders are expected to confront Chairman Charles Brown with a sorry list of woes. Those will include declining service, the company's rapidly shrinking share of the $44 billion longdistance market (in the face of gains by competitors such as MCI Communications and GTE Sprint), weakened revenue and earnings projections for 1984, and the performance of the new company's stock since November, down 20% to a near...
...complaining seems to have crested in some areas. Calls have fallen off sharply to many of the local operating companies' "let's talk" lines, which were begun last year to explain the twists and turns of the breakup. Nonetheless, since the first of the year the Federal Communications Commission has received 14,000 letters of complaint about phone service, 400% more than usual. Biggest gripe: slowness in installing new lines. The central message in most of the mail has less to do with actual shortcomings than with a changing attitude toward the phone company. Says an FCC staffer...
Richard Kessel, executive director of the New York State consumer-protection board, scoffs at that. Says he: "Most of New York Tel's costs are due to the divestiture, and it is unfair to try to stick consumers with the costs. We did not ask for the breakup." Says Sylvia Siegel, the director of the San Francisco-based group TURN (Toward Utility Rate Normalization): "It's a mess. In fact, it's a holy mess. The telephone companies are using divestiture as an excuse to get all the price increases they ever wanted...
...words: access charges." Those fees, ranging from $2 for individuals to $6 for small-business users with only one line, would have given $3.5 billion to local phone companies to offset the loss of subsidies from long-distance tolls that they had received from AT&T before the breakup...