Owen DeLong wrote: > Some, but not a lot. In the case of the DTMF transition, the > network and handsets were all under the central control of a > single provider at a time when they could have forced the change > if they really wanted to. After all, nobody was going to cancel > their phone service altogether (or such a small fraction of > subscribers as to count as a rounding error anyway) over the > issue and AT&T could simply have shipped replacement phones > with instructions for returning the older phone and done a > retrofit operation if they really wanted to drive the transition.
True, yet there's a missing piece to that description: ROI. In the regulated environment with a mandated X% Return On Invest- ment (X ≈ 15 IIRC) a bigger expense pie was a better pie because a bigger expense pie meant a bigger return. This was an inexorable force that influenced every substantive decision. An expanding rate base was the One True Path to advancing against the demon competitors: AT&T and other RBOCs. In the Bell System setting, before and after Divestiture, a perpetual and costly migration from IPv4 to IPv6 with all the attendant cost burdens would have been well tolerated, even welcomed, in the "C Suite" anyways. -- Charles Polisher
