 manufacturers in the industry, would be considered proprietary. Because AT&T was the only game in town (in the United States at least) prior to divestiture, AT&T created the standard for transmission interfaces. Fast forward now to January 1, 1984, and put yourself into the mind of MCI's Bill McGowan, whose company's very survival depended upon the successful implementation of Equal Access. Unfortunately, Equal Access had one very serious flaw. Keep in mind that, because the post- 1984 network was emerging from the darkness of monopoly control, all of the equipment that made up the network infrastructure was bought at the proverbial company store-and was, by the way, proprietary. Consider the newly recreated postdivestiture network model shown in Figure 3-7. At the local switch level, precious little has changed-at this point in time there is still only a single local service provider. At the long- distance level, however, there is a significant change. Instead of a single long-distance service provider called AT&T, there are now three-AT&T, MCI, and Sprint. The competitive mandate of Equal Access was designed 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 Chapter 3 MCI Long-Distance Switch Figure 3-7 Postdivestiture AT&T Long-Distance Switch Sprint Long-Distance Switch connectivity RBOC Local Switches to guarantee that a customer could freely select their long-distance provider of choice. If they wanted to use MCI's service instead of AT&T's, a simple call to the local telephone company's service representative would result in the generation of a service order that would cause the customer's local service to be logically disconnected from AT&T and reconnected to MCI so that long-distance calls placed by the subscriber would automatically be handed off to MCI. The problem of "equal access" to customers for the three long-distance