1997

Bell Atlantic and NYNEX

In the spring of ’97 Bell Atlantic held their annual technical conference in which the different divisions of the company made presentations about the new developments and technology within the company.  This year it was being held at a large conference hall just outside of Washington DC in Rosslyn Virginia and there was to be a presentation on the progress of video systems including fiber to the home and so most of our group at BVS went to it. It was quite a large gathering with several hundred attendees, so we arrived early and found seats in the auditorium and the presentations began. Most of it I found pretty boring, the latest telephony equipment, new electronic switches, and phone routers, all for what was called the Plane Old Phone Service or POTS. POTS was the core of the phone business, every home and business in the country had POTS lines, copper wire, to the home or business. There was a presentation about the intrusion of the TV Cable companies who were starting to provide telephone services over their coax TV cables which had them concerned. The Internet was becoming popular, in 1997, about half of all U.S. homes with Internet access had it through AOL, over 30 million, most of them using dial up service over POTS line. There was a presentation about using the Internet for phone service using Voice over IP or VOIP, but the speaker’s opinion was that it wasn’t going to go anywhere.  Then came the presentation of the new fiber to the home service which included video.  I had never seen such a convoluted architecture and design. The design was based on the old POTS service equipment, with local exchanges, switching equipment, and even having a copper wire bundled with the fiber so it could support old phones in homes. I kept up on the latest internet and computer technology and I remember sitting there thinking, “Why didn’t they make it all internet, IP based, it would be so much simpler.”  

In August it happened to me again, yet another company merger, Bell Atlantic merged with NYNEX, another one of the Bell companies. I found it quite interesting that they broke up the Bell Monopoly back in 1982 and now, 15 years later, they were merging back together. It was the breakup of the Bells that allowed them to branch out into other areas of business besides the telephone service like the video service I was working on.  After my experience with CCI merging with ICL, then CBIS Federal with DynCorp, I wasn’t too excited about it.  Of course, Bell Atlantic wasn’t the only Bell trying to get into video, NYNEX was doing the same. I had learned before that when there is a company merger, duplicate services would either get merged or one side eliminated.  We were told there was nothing to worry about, NYNEX and Bell Atlantic video divisions complemented each other and would be merged into one seamless operation.  Yeah, right. 

PTB & A