tions Act of 1934. This act moved industry oversight from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the FCC, and recognized the importance of telephone ser- vice, mandating that it would be both affordable and universal. By now, AT&T provided local and long-distance service and offered central office equipment and telephones to more than 90 percent of the market. Not surprisingly, that smacked of monopoly to the federal gov- ernment, and from that point on they were squarely in the FCC's gun sights. In 1948, AT&T sued the Hush-a-Phone Corporation for manufactur- ing a device that physically connected to the telephone network. The device, shown in Figure 3-4, was nothing more than a metal box that fit Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telephony Telephony Figure 3-4 Hush-a-Phone over the mouthpiece of the telephone, blocking out extraneous noise and providing a degree of privacy to the person using the phone. It had no electrical component to it; it was merely a box. Hush-a-Phone won the case, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled that AT&T could not prohibit people from making money from devices that did not electrically connect to AT&T's network. In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against AT&T and Western Electric. The result was the consent decree of 1956, which allowed AT&T to keep Western Electric, but restricted them to the deliv- ery of common carrier services. In the early 1960s, inventor Tom Carter created a device called the Carterphone, shown in Figure 3-5. The Carterphone allowed mobile car radios to connect to the telephone network and did require electrical con- nectivity to AT&T. Initially, AT&T prohibited Carter from connecting his Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copvright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, All rights reser