FCC approves $87b AT&T + BellSouth merger: now what?

Ok, quick refresher: in 1984 the government splits up AT&T into the Baby Bells; through a series of mergers and acquisitions, most of the original AT&T is reformed into a new company with the old brand, spearheaded by the business formerly known as SBC. SBC's new AT&T owns in whole or in part: Cingular, AT&T Wireless, AT&T -- and now its closest ally in business (and co-owner of Cingular), BellSouth. That is, after months of deliberation and delays (we won't bore you with the political details as to why -- if you want to know more, check here), the $87 billion merger (hey, that went up 20 billion!) was finally given the greenlight by the FCC and SEC, as you may or may not have heard. So what does that mean customers can expect from the newly reformed AT&T? Here's a taste:

• The Cingular brand eventually will die and actually become AT&T Wireless -- the very brand it paid billions to acquire.
• AT&T has agreed to maintain net neutrality for up to two years; after that, we're of what happens. This concession can be overturned if Congress passes anti-net neutrality laws, which we're all hoping, of course, that it doesn't.
  
• AT&T has agreed to sell "naked" DSL for $20 a month as a standard package.
  
• AT&T is likely also to strive for more aggressive triple (or quadruple) play packages, as it rolls out U-Verse-based IPTV. In some regions, customers can expect to get TV, DSL, phone, and cellphone service all under the AT&T brand.
• Baby Bell remnants still competing with AT&T in one vertical or another: Verizon, Qwest, Cincinnati Bell.

For more info on how AT&T was broken down and reformed, check out The Engadget Guide to AT&T Wireless/Cingular/SBC/AT&T merger mania.

[Wayne Holmes @ Dec 31st 2006 7:28PM]

Map is not totally accurate. Verizon has a large presence in several portions of the the Western US. (Basically the old GTE territory.)

[Robert Andrews @ Jan 1st 2007 5:05AM]

Yea, I believe the map is going by who has the majority in that state. I know here in WA, Verizon has FIOS and Verizon DSL, but of course only in those areas previously served by GTE West.

[neATL @ Dec 31st 2006 8:11PM]

Verizon didn't take on ALL of old GTE, the rest SBC and PacBell took on which are all now......ATT. I work for Bellsouth, my wife at ATT and now we're both working for the same company. I love this government.

[loker @ Jan 1st 2007 3:20AM]

Verizon has a large portion of michigan and the rest of the mid-west......

[Wonderer @ Dec 31st 2006 7:48PM]

Yay for huge monopolies. Let's all thank the government for caring more about the cooperations than the people. YAY.

[bell employee @ Feb 13th 2007 10:44PM]

As a craft (read, union) employee of BellSouth, standing to make nothing out of this merger financially, I'm more scared then anything else. Having been through telecom mergers before, I've lost my job to "turnover" ie, someone gets hired to do my job for a lot less money. Most of these hires and fires get hidden in merger related losses, hires and more. Granted this time I'm lucky enough to have my union, CWA, behind me, not to mention my SBC/AT&T variant which is supposedly stronger.

A born resident of the South and having lived through and worked for and with other former Bell/ATT companies, BellSouth has been the easiest and best company out there. I speak as a consumer of data and telecom services. I'm actually sad to see my favorite bell company, and current employer become part of a California corporate and overly large empire (nightmare?).

Including Atlanta and other areas served by the BellSouth RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company) I've found my company to be by far the best telecom there is. It's an end of an era and sadly our longtime CEO, Dwayne Ackerman. He is being outed with this merger. He was scheduled and required to retired at 65, but his longtime steady hand at the helm of a company I truly love is sad and many the reason our stock has been the highest performer of any Bell out there.

Now there is one less of us... Only three even large Bells, 22 years after Judge Green's decision truly split us. We were also the last to use "Bell" in our name.

[Russell @ Dec 31st 2006 8:04PM]

I know I'm ready for Naked DSL :)

[nj @ Dec 31st 2006 8:11PM]

i hope that at&t extends their range because of this deal. i leave near Detroit and Ann Arbor michigan and i can not get any internet besides dreadfully slow satellite. PLEASE at&t show mercie upon me and other michiganders!

[Kevin @ Dec 31st 2006 9:31PM]

I still think it's a horrible idea that they're killing off the Cingular name. AT+T Wireless just sounds clunky and old when compared to Cingular.

[William @ Dec 31st 2006 10:01PM]

Is it just me or is bullet 2 hard to digest? "we're of what happens"?

[Mike @ Dec 31st 2006 10:05PM]

Can someone tell me what is naked DSL? Also, AT&T needs to take back Cincy Bell bc they suck!

[... @ Dec 31st 2006 10:46PM]

naked DSL = only dsl, no tv/phone

But I am curious as to what speed they will provide it at, there isn't anything stopping them from capping it at 10kb/s and charging the traditional $50 a month for something reasonably fast...

I also worry about the net neutrality will only last 2 years... If they have a monopoly over everyone and get paid enough money for anti-net neutrality we could all be screwed.

[Ruach10 @ Dec 31st 2006 11:02PM]

I'm in Tampa Florida and this is't Bell South Territory, it's Verizon!

[namire @ Dec 31st 2006 11:17PM]

2 years for net neutrality really sux. I should be like a the 28th amendment not somethign ppl have to protest and argue about. Plus monopolies are bad too... censorship, wiretapping w/o warrants... *cough* (Patriot Act)

[mathew @ Dec 31st 2006 11:25PM]

I drew a graph showing how AT&T is related to AT&T. It's at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meta404/319076886/

[Leonard Nimrod @ Dec 31st 2006 11:36PM]

No need to post the "inaccuracies" of the chart. The chart makes mentions of why your carrier is not shown. It states.....

"Many small, scattered areas receive phone service from non-RBOC carriers. For clarity, these carriers are not shown"

[Josh S. @ Dec 31st 2006 11:40PM]

So after splitting AT&T apart, all the pieces are slowly but surely putting themselves back together.

Ahhhhh.....I love this country.

[Mike @ Jan 1st 2007 10:54AM]

Thank Premier George Walter Bush and the Repubican big business whores.

What's good for big business is good for America..... NOT!

If you don't want net neutrality, keep voting Republican. After all, they are looking out for you... NOT!

[adam @ Jan 1st 2007 4:37AM]

ok, whoever made that map is retarted. i'm in NE indiana and we have verizon here

[Chris Merchant @ Jan 1st 2007 4:49AM]

"ok, whoever made that map is retarted. i'm in NE indiana and we have verizon here"

No, bucko, you're 'retarted'. Which, isn't a word.

Just because you have a certian carrier, doesn't mean that that bell operated company typically presides over your jurisdiction.

Stay focused. Drink less booze.

Chris

[Jill @ Jan 2nd 2007 9:57PM]

Omg so true so true... you are so funny thanks for the laugh.

[eflyersteve @ Jan 1st 2007 9:53AM]

When they big split happened back in 84, it created an environment of no competition and small ma and pop telcos thrived. Which is good for ma and pop, but sucks for the rest of us who have no choices in a telco. I get to pay $45.00 a month for 768k DSL plus $20.00 a month for a dialtone because of the much smaller monopoly that was created by that split.

This may be a very good thing for the consumer.

[Charles R Hamilton @ Jan 1st 2007 12:11PM]

Is there anything that cannot be blamed on George Bush? Grow up.

[Scott @ Jan 1st 2007 1:14PM]

It's not a bad thing, just think of how convenient it is to live in Bell Tower, shop at Bell Tower, work at Bell Tower, if we are really good boys and girls maybe we will get an extra chocolate ration next week, oh wait, my Bell doctor says that they have been monitoring my Bell purchases and I shouldn't eat as much Bell chocolate, or look at so much porn on my Bell DSN.
Maybe I should go live in Microsoft Tower.

Monopolies make your buying decisions easier.
"Choose one or the one."

[DemaSRV @ Jan 1st 2007 1:59PM]

@Mike

Actually you can thank Clinton for letting most of this happen, not bush.

[ChillyWilly @ Jan 1st 2007 7:31PM]

*sigh*

So how many billions of dollars have been wasted on all of the breakups and mergers over the years? What a waste of both money and resources and a crappy brand that IMO, hasn't mattered since the late 80's.

I remember at one point in the 90's, having no less than 15 different AT&T numbers to contact for various pieces of their services I used when I ran my own consulting business. It was a pure hellish nightmare and I can't tell you how many times I heard "We don't handle that here. You will need to hang up and call....."

And now with them wasting even more money and coming back under the AT&T name, I seriously don't think any previous lessons of lackluster customer service will be learned in the process.

I would rather see a return to bringing back the ma's and pa's of phone companies. I think part of that is coming true with companies like Vonage and the promise of VOIP. Now to fight for ma's and pa's in the broadband internet side of things.

[topmounter @ Jan 3rd 2007 10:48AM]

Net neutrality is nothing more than giving up, abandoning competition and settling for a government regulated Internet.

[ChillyWilly @ Jan 1st 2007 7:34PM]

@demaSRV... as much as I liked Clinton, there were a few bills he signed that screwed things up. The 1996 Telecom bill didn't do much to help to clean up the mess that we are seeing now.

[b @ Jan 2nd 2007 12:44AM]

Does this mean us cellular users get decent customer service back?

[Sam @ Jan 5th 2007 1:49PM]

I've still got SBCyahoo from before their merger with AT&T and since the merger the only difference is that they added a 9mbit "Elite" connection to (I suppose) combat Comcast's 12mbit connections they've just rolled out here (Midwest).

I'm afraid that with this monopoly they will eventually buy Comcast (I wonder if that is possible) and then they will literally be the only ISP in the entire midwest (Other than Time Warner, but that is another mess entirely, and we don't get that here).

What are they doing in Washington? This new Congress should axe this merger immediatly.

[Merhawie @ Jan 6th 2007 10:45PM]

So I called AT&T to see if I could switch over to the "naked" option...and they looked at me (well if I had been standing there) like I was crazy! They said they had no idea what I was talking about and there certainly wasn't a "naked" for less than $20.

[Melissa @ Jan 20th 2007 3:42PM]

This really scares me. I worked for Pac Bell while they were "merging" with SBC we were told all sorts of lies how this wasn't going to affect our jobs, blah blah...six months later many of our offices were closing because what we were doing in California, they could do in St. Louis - cheaper. Now, I believe it's been about eight years, none of the original offices in San Francisco remain. The only SBC/AT&T employees left are a few people in frames and tech's. Everyone else was either laid off, transferred or all together fired. What do you think is going to happen now with this merger?!

[Concerned Citizen16 @ Jul 6th 2007 1:23PM]

I originally had wireless service with AT&T a few years back. Everything is fine as long as there were no problems. As soon as you do something like move, upgrade packages, or somehow hit a roaming charge in an area where it was in your area, you were screwed. I spent many hours on the phone with many different customer service agents each time explaining the same thing over and over and promised that it was fixed only to call back later and find it was not. I even had trouble with them when I dropped them and picked up Verizon. Trouble enough that I was also involved with the Class Action Lawsuit against them at that time (I got my $20 back they had forceably taken from me at the end because at that time if you were 1 day over your monthly statement they charged you for the whole month, meaning you had to call on the exact day of the final billing day to avoid this and cancel).

But that is all water under the bridge, so I move to Ohio a few years later and stayed with Verizon Wireless where customer service is soo much better. I picked up SBC DSL in cooperation with yahoo since they ruled that area and I wanted faster than dialup, cable was just too expensive yet. After being with SBC for two years I noticed customer service lacking more and more, then the announcement that SBC was bought by Cingular/AT&T. I thought great, I really hate that company, but decided to stay with it, til I moved three times (just moved up inside a rental facility to bigger places) in a two year period. Each time customer service was horrible, even after telling them how to switch where the darn box was that needed to be turned on and even after multiple times of telling me to wait til 7pm to be turned on each time. Everytime they never sent a frickin man out to turn it on, they automatically assumed that the system would just enable the line. Everytime I've had to flag down a random SBC/AT&T work truck in the area to turn me on then they would call and confirm it with their office.

So for the last time I moved I told them everything of the last two moves and that it was a new address no one had lived there and I even confirmed it with a manager to check the account and they said everything was prepared. Moving day came and went and my service was supposed to be on, Haha again it was not. Calling back in told to wait til 7pm and again called later they find the system didn't schedule an order to send someone out again talked to a manager and they said earliest to turn me on would be in 2 days. I got their phone number, hung up. Then thought this is so crap having to deal with horrible customer service from this company. I called Insight Cable (a cable company of Time Warner) they told me I could pick up the modem and install it myself the next day and 5MB/s would be $30 a month no other services needed. I was sold, called AT&T back (supervisor) and cancelled them soo fast their head should have spun. Now I have no more customer service problems other than just regular every day things, no more large headaches from a monopoly company too large for it's own good.

[tekwyzrd @ Jul 7th 2007 1:38AM]

[quote]After being with SBC for two years I noticed customer service lacking more and more, then the announcement that SBC was bought by Cingular/AT&T[/quote]

Err... No. SBC bought AT&T then assumed the name.

Yes, the tech support is terrible. It's hard to understand the tech support people and their heavy Indian accents (as in India, not Native American).