In essence, AT&T priced some of its intercity services, such as private line, WATS, and regular long distance, relatively high in order to subsidize the enormous costs of building and maintaining the nation’s wire-and-cable telephone infrastructure. If those costs were just passed on to local telephone users in the monthly bill, the price of residential phone service might double or triple. Instead, local service received a subsidy from long-distance revenues. How great that subsidy was, and what shape it actually took, was something regulators often disagreed about. But there was one thing
...more
