Rumors started to circulate on the morning of Friday, January 8, 1982, that a settlement had been reached in the government's antitrust suit against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Trading was halted in AT&T's stock at midmorning, and at noon William Baxter, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, and Charles L. Brown, the chairman of AT&T's board, held a press conference. They announced that the rumors were indeed correct. The case had been settled.

The agreement followed lines that Baxter had advocated. The Bell Operating Companies, which furnished local telephone service for most of the country, were to be divested from AT&T, which would retain its ownership of Western Electric and Bell Labs and would continue to provide long distance service. The Bell System, which had formed the backbone of American telephone service for a century, would no longer exist. No single company would be able to exercise the sort of end-to-end responsibility that AT&T had long held for most telecommunications in the United States.

The complex process of divestiture would take two years to complete; the new industry structure came into being at the start of 1984. The immediate effect on consumers was expected to be negative, and it was. Repairs – already becoming more difficult to obtain because of FCC decisions – became even more expensive and harder to arrange. Was the problem in the telephone (either your property or AT&T's) or the telephone lines (the local telephone company's responsibility)? Everyone's mailbox filled up with incomprehensible messages about something called “equal access.”