Haha...We're in trouble.

Remember when the original AT&T was taken to federal court and then removed? Due to monopoly reasons?

Well...SBC took AT&T and renamed themselves AT&T Inc, now their repeating their selfs again. They just took over all of Bellsouth.



*quotes friend from another board*

As you can see, the blue areas are AT&T areas, and the yellow area is Bellsouth's territory....

Also, I might add, AT&T owns 60% of Cingular Wireless...guess who owns the other 40%? You got it: Bellsouth. Thus, people, AT&T now has the largest telecommunications company in the US of A....Most likely you will see Cingular's name dropped in the next year or so (or sooner) and changed to "AT&T Wireless".

*sniffs* What's that? Ahhh, it's Ma Bell in the kitchen serving up her famous monopoly-pies.


There's been a few concessions made on AT&T's part, but...most of them are pretty useless, or will become null because of loophole's (of course AT&T purposefully did this)...for example, you will be able to get naked DSL (DSL without a phone line subscription), but...BUT they'll only allow you to have 768K with that....pretty pathetic.

Oh well.....


Look out Qwest, you're next!

Me:

I looked at AT&T recently.. found this.



They bought out AT&T, and then became AT&T Inc.

So, looks like..

SBC (Now AT&T Inc) has taken the bell companies, seems like cingular is now theirs too, since Bell owned the other 40%, and I guess that means AT&T Wireless will be coming. Meaning, Cingular dies, or changes name.

AT&T assets it seems..





..Yeah, well you get the picture. It's basically a repeat, you can look at the Wiki site for it...down at the bottom shows everything they now own. Pretty bad.


...SO. Thoughts? XD

Besides that. I feel bad for us Bellsouth customers, AT&T has been routing calls to NSA for monitoring every since 9/11.

That and it seems everytime SBC(Now AT&T inc) gets bigger it becomes worse in service.

Nah, but they'll do the same thing they did to Bell, take each part slowly, one at a time.

Bellsouth was the last one of the Bell group.

SBC now being AT&T Inc, I doubt anythings changed. Though, living here and using Bellsouth for 12 years, I can't say it sucked, it was pretty cheap compared to everything else.

Edit: Imma quote a friend here.

Edited by Sage on December 30, 2006 at 20:15:46.

That IS pretty interesting indeed. I knew of the previous AT&T split into all of the "Baby Bells", but I didn't realize until now that the company was getting close to return to it's original self. This might be fun to watch in the coming months and years!

Nice, Mega. That pretty much sums it up.


BD: Yeah, they've been doing that for quite awhile, also. Do you use Time Warner for like home phone? Cause..I thought Time Warner was only an ISP.

Sucks to be you! (It does sound true, though!)

Btw, BD.


I feel bad for you, Time Warner is the parent company of AOL.

XP

But, the fact Time Warner is the parent company of AOL, they technically are AOL.

Well, they *are* AOL, just under a different name.

You kinda missed the point, if Time Warner owns AOL..and AOL is bad, then just what does that make Time Warner, ey?

AOL wasn't always owned by TimeWarner.

Therefore, all of their crappy stuff started before that.

Illinois Bell was taken over by Ameritech a long time ago. But we never had an AT&T phone monopoly before that.

And Cingular already merged with AT&T, and AT&T wireless is CRAP; you cannot get service anywhere, and the customer service does not respond to you and I think even lied once. So if their reputation as AT&T is consistent with their service, I doubt they will be using that name anytime soon.

Should check your sources, they didn't merge, FCC denied it due to the fact that Bellsouth owned the other 40% of Cingular, only recently did AT&T Inc aquire the rest of Cingular.

So yeah.

and the last AT&T phone monopoly was in 1984.

Also, Ameritech is no longer there, as its owned by AT&T, basically every other small phone company that tried to compete, sides the ones on the map.

Where did the words "it was not recent" enter my posts?

Um, OBVIOULSY it was recent or there would be no reason for it to be being discussed.

Ameritech is not a small company, nor is it non-existant considering it is rather hard to find a payphone that is not operated by Ameritech.

It may be owned by AT&T; I do not know, but it does not matter who owns it it still exists.

*sigh*

God, in May 1998, Ameritech merged with SBC, even selling their wireless company to GTE.

SBC then got ahold of AT&T Corporation, as soon as they did that, they changed their name to AT&T Inc.

Ameritech is owned by AT&T, they may have payphones, but their not considered its own company anymore, now that its being ran by AT&T. It went under advertising as SBC Ameritech, now it advertises as AT&T Ameritech

You google Ameritech, and AT&T is the first thing that comes up too. That, and AT&T has yet to change all the payphones over to their new logo.



And, yes, yes it does matter who owns it. AT&T is a horrible company that even when they were SBC, every time they got bigger their service got worse, you said this yourself. Same goes for Ameritech now that its ran by AT&T also, that and AT&T routes all calls to the NSA. I don't know about you, but I like my conversations being private.

Edited by Sage on January 3, 2007 at 17:57:10.

True. If you want to go by the details, actually, AOL originally purchased Time Warner. The respective worth of the two groups has since shifted, so that Time Warner is the larger unit now.

Actually, I only said AT&T Wireless was; our home phone service was fine, and I loved their digital cable (which never went out like DirectTV, most other satellite, and some digital providers).

And merging or not it is still seperate within the same... like Coca-Cola under which most non-cola sodas are recognized individually.

I did not know that; I was only aware of the company name showing up as "AOL/Time Warner." But AOL is and always has sucked, Time Warner really has nothing recognizable and commonly known by the public for which we can judge. I guess they must have kept most of the same higher-ups (employees) and systems in place, though, because AOL really didn't change much except for more "features" which really mean nothing. (Well, they got a free e-mail, but that's fairly normal.)

here's another little diagram that shows all the companies Verizon, Qwest, and AT&T own.



quote friend.

Verizon has already sold all of it's DSL and telephone lines in a number of New England states because it's not profitable....plus they probably want to pour more money into their FiOS set up.

I doubt Verizon is next, as they have Vodafone on their side (largest telco company in the world).

I think that in the near future Qwest will fall to the likes of AT&T, and Verizon will buy out the rest of Vodafone.

Still, AT&T is extremely powerful, and may have the capability of buying Verizon too...Man, what a world that would be; not only would AT&T be a US monopoly, but a foreign one too...that'd be a first for a telephone company!

I highly doubt if the government will bring that whole anti-trust thing into play...the Government is getting certain "perks" from this, if you know what I mean.

I almost forgot...if you look at Qwest's territory by square mile, it already looks like it's mostly owned by AT&T, so it would make sense for the ever-crumbling Qwest to fall to AT&T in the near future.

Uh....no? You should refresh your cache or something..it's all blue now.

Ah well, Magiman. You never know, AT&T has ways of forcing people to submit to their will, and join with them, wether they buy them out or merge.