AT&T Nears $65 Billion Deal To Buy BellSouth

The Wall Street Journal (Excerpt) (Subscription required) ^ | March 5, 2006 | DIONNE SEARCEY, AMY SCHATZ, ALMAR LATOUR and DENNIS BERMAN

[AGreatPer]

Just wondering what this will do to AT&T stocks tomorrow?

[TXBSAFH]

It is still sbc, they just changed their name back to at&t when they took it over.

[eyespysomething]

LOL, GMTA!

[July 4th]

The band!!

[Trust but Verify]

Whatever. You hate SBC, we've all heard it. End of discussion..

[Trust but Verify]

BTW, Hal, there WAS no recession.

[SierraWasp]

How do you think this will effect AT&T's(T) stock Monday morning???

[Bogey78O]

'are the phones up in NO? '

All wire Centers are back in operation with the exception of St. Bernard and Chalmette. Even Lake Catherine has phones.

[Southack]

"How do you think this will effect AT&T's(T) stock Monday morning???"

I don't have a clue...but I can tell you that *I'm* not buying AT&T's stock Monday morning!

In the short term, AT&T will have tremendous merger costs. In the big picture, AT&T is losing long distance subscribers each year.

Over the long term, AT&T will be able to dramatically cut costs by eliminating large numbers of management jobs.

Will that be enough for AT&T to be competitive with cable, cellular, and internet long distance (and video phones)?

Man, I don't have that answer for you.

[ASOC]

Cool ,so post 84 breakup telcos still have a good stong DR policy....

[El Conservador]

This acquisiton has one reason of being: Cingular.

AT&T doesn't give two turds about copper-wire land lines anymore. Everything is VOIP and wireless today.

[freeangel]

"by eliminating large numbers of management jobs"

That will be interesting. 1500 managers at Bellsouth will be eliminated as of April.

[aShepard]

....And how much did the gov't spend way back when to break up ol' MaBell cuz she was too much of a monopoly??.....

And, remember the technology engine that used to be Bell Labs???? The spun off Lucent has been a disaster for American ingenuity

[SierraWasp]

Well, out here, the SBC dudes working the lines, so to speak, say that SBC is in the AT&T "drivers seat," and that the AT&T name survives as just the name of the company driven by SBC. They are just as adamant about that as my trademark three exclamation mark punctuation excess!!!

Of course we like it better when it was call "Pacific Bell" before SBC bought that entity and ruined the name of the San Franpsycho Giants baseball stadium by changing it from "Pac Bell Park" to "SBC Stadium!" At least now we'll get back to the AT&T at Pebble Beach and "AT&T Park" in SFO!!!

I just found this article on which Mutual Funds Hold the most Bell South and AT&T shares

I'm sure those who already hold shares of either, or both today will fare far better than anyone just putting their order in before the bell on Monday!!! (but still...)

[Dog Gone]

As long as they don't mess with Cingular, I'm okay with it.

But I'll still check that link to see what it means to my mutual funds.

[SierraWasp]

Barrons February 6 issue ranked the two biggest holders mentioned in the link as the number one and number two fund families over the past 10 years!!!

[Myrddin]

I had to work 12 hour shifts during the last CWA strike in 1989 at PacBell. I drove from office to office over the southern California desert. I worked all the trouble calls and moved on to the next office. During the strike, Western Electric installed and cut new remote Nortel switches. When the strike was over, the old step offices were dead. All the maintenance was done remotely. Half the people who went on strike discovered their services were no longer necessary.

During the same strike, the data center installed huge DLT tape robots on the Amdahl floor. The 30 reel to reel units were removed. They also cut 28 of 30 jobs in that department. The staff that worked on the COSMOS systems also returned to find 8mm tapes installed in place of the old 9-track reel to reel. Staff cut of 100%. The manager could swap all the tapes in 10 minutes each day.

Strikes are opportunities to find out how to do more with less.

[Myrddin]

If the Bell system had not been broken up we'd still be paying $0.50/minute for daytime long distance.

I'm sure you realize that bit of socialism was forced upon the Bell System by the government. Business rates and long distance was jacked up to subsidize suburban and rural phone service. High density city areas provide pretty good revenue. The cost of running a line out into the hinter land that gets little revenue producing use is pretty high.

The breakup made it harder to force the socialistic subsidy programs on business and long distance. Now it nails everyone. Just look at all the charges on your phone bill. The major difference is that services are priced closer to actual cost. When I was young, the $5 month phone bill seemed excessive. My regular phone plus DSL, plus ISP plus two cell phones soak up $200/month now. I'm not certain that 50 cents per minute would cost that much more in comparison.

[Koblenz]

I am amazed how little I have to pay for phone service. I have three lines, and with taxes and fees, the total is $125 for all three lines. This is way less than my parents paid for one line when I was growing up, and I make a lot more long distance calls than they did. Back then, a long distance call was a big deal, now it's not.

Deregulation worked. It brought about competition.

[cva66snipe]

As a former AT&T Mgr. satellites were not used in 1970 for anything but experimentation..Overseas call were a combination of AT&T to the Trans-ocean cable or to High {4.0 MHz to 18.0 MHz range}Freq AM radio. Once you connected to the other country's technology, you became a victim of their equipment which was not 100% compatible with ours. Plus many of these countries were in the "dark ages" as far as telephone equipment. Fading was probably caused by use of the HF radio connection.

Ok thanks the AM makes since by it's very nature there would be fading issues. The only place I managed to make a call back to the states from a phone booth was in Vience. It went right through.

We could call home via HAM Radio relaying but that was limited and no privacy. My cousin deployed on the USS LINCOLN a few years back and he could call home from on the ship at about any time via satellite. But he paid through the teeth to do it to.