Post #4171128

2026-07-28 02:23 UTC

What's the difference between 1990 and today? AT&T in 1990 was no longer a monopoly; there was competition in long distance, so some calls got through, just as calls went through today on T-Mobile's competetors. The main difference was expectation. 1990 was still the era of "5 9's" of reliability (99.999% uptime). Telephone services were simply not expected to fail. We expect phone (and Internet) service today to be MOSTLY reliable, but we're conditioned to expect failure from time to time.

Replies (4)

@chetwisniewski@securitycafe.ca 2026-07-28 02:29

@mattblaze@federate.social I would argue that there is a lot more than that different today. We are used to the lack of accountability and enshitification to the point where we expect failure and cheating. Being called before Congress before Citizens United meant being held to account, a dip in stock prices, and the potential to be fired for the executives having failed to meet our collective needs and expectations. No more. We've been conditioned to not just accept corruption and failure, but expect it. Telstra in Australia had a major outage due to negligence in maintaining NTP services causing a major outage. It appears they are being held to account by both the government and the public. We don't have to accept this as fait accompli.

Open ##4171528
@ddgulledge@social.linux.pizza 2026-07-28 02:48

@mattblaze@federate.social Also, it's impossible to have 5 9s reliability if user behavior is required for the measurement. In 1990, you could determine that the long distance switches were down because when Grandma tried to call Aunt Edna, she got a fast busy rather than a wrong number. Today, Grandma spent 20 minutes wondering why no one picked up when she texted.

Open ##4171530
@drmorr@hachyderm.io 2026-07-28 03:27

@mattblaze@federate.social the other difference is that nobody talks on the phone anymore. I went all day as a T-Mobile customer and had no idea they were having any sort of outage.

Open ##4171536
@mattblaze@federate.social 2026-07-30 01:41

Sure enough: Nationwide, hours long T-Mobile outage was Monday. Today is Wednesday, and it's fallen completely off the radar.

Open ##4223011