Call me old, but with the exception of mobile phone service (let's not talk about the Internet), Ma Bell, as AT&T was known until its break up into baby Bells, was the one thing that still worked without exception in the USA. Sure, it was an old monopoly that had grown up and just got fatter from the days of Edison. But local and in-state calls were kept cheap and if anything went wrong with your phone they came out and fixed it. Imagine that! They came to your home and fixed it! For many years it was cost-free. Then cats (among other pets) learned to enjoy playing with the new-fangled coiled vinyl cords and would chew through them or outright eat them. And then someone decided a black phone wasn't good enough and we needed to lease "Princess" phones for our teen aged girls, and mom needed a yellow wall phone to match her kitchen drapes. That was the beginning of th end. Long distance calls emptied your pockets, but I still rarely make long distance calls. In fact, whenever I need to make a long distance call I go to a locutorio, a little business that provides phone booths (remember those?) where you can sit and talk in some measure of privacy and peace. The last 30-minute call I made from Buenos Aires to Elko, Nevada, cost a whopping 30 Pesos (divide by four for the US$ amount).
But then, unlike the fabulous free-markets at work in the USA, there are different laws governing how much companies can rape and pillage from citizens of Spain and South American Countries. Although Mexico will soon cost an arm and a leg to make a call from it is, after all, a part of North America.
While there is some truth to the fact that communication engineering would not have advanced as fast as it has in the last 40 years, I would happily go back to a time when everyone had a dedicated phone line and no one interrupted my lunch or dinner or conversation because -- for some reason -- the person calling my friends on their cell phones are much more important than I am, who happens to be right in front of them in the middle of a conversation.
Now, get off my fucking lawn before I get started on the deregulation of the airlines when Reagan napped into office.