Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

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

Posted on 03/04/2006 10:22:21 PM PST by HAL9000

Excerpt -

AT&T Inc. is nearing the acquisition of BellSouth Corp. for roughly $65 billion, people familiar with the situation said Saturday evening. A deal could be announced as early as Monday, these people said.

~snip~


(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Front Page News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: att; babybells; bellsouth; cingular; edwhitacre; fcc; kevinmartin; lowqualitycrap; mabell; rbocs; robertmcdowell; sbc; telecom; verizon
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120121-137 last
To: ThanhPhero
Do you remember what long distance cost per minute? even when you don't discount for inflation? ATT was still hitting me for $.35 a minute when I got my LD switched over to a $.05/minute company. ATT sent me ads fairly recently telling me how much I can save by getting their LD service for 20 cents/min. for the first 3 months (plus tax and tag, of course).

Yep and I also know that the technology to make calls cheaper was being installed nation wide just about the time of the split too. The new switches were more or less self running and cost was cut. Administrative cost used to eat up a lot of billing cost. Now it's all done by computer. The split didn't bring the change but rather the change was coming anyway. I haven't paid for a long distance call in several years. I use the cell for that but actually I still do pay as they add it into the service plan.

Expanded service areas for local calls came about mainly due to billing issues. It was cheaper to raise everybody's rates a small bit that do the billing.

121 posted on 03/05/2006 5:37:49 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 57 | View Replies]

To: markman46
yep, and if you were an employee you got free service, my old man work for the old "PT&T"(pacific telisis,pac tel,SBC) for 35 yrs got early retirement in 1982. I got all kinds of cool stuff when I was a kid

Yea I know what you mean. We built our home security and nobody knew what the heck it was. Here's a better one. Remember the dummy jack pins that they used to make or break a circuit? Usually white and went into what looked like a head phone jack? The switch had anywhere from 4-10 contacts I think. We wired our car coils through them to ground. When you parked the car you pulled out the pin and took it with you. Thieves looked for toggle switches :>} We never had one stolen that was wired like that.

122 posted on 03/05/2006 5:44:46 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 67 | View Replies]

To: RFEngineer
Now, as to being able to have crews on standby to fix any problem......Do you know how much phone service would cost today if you had Union CWA workers staffed up to provide the sort of service you envision? It would be staggeringly expensive - service today would rival your mortgage payment if that were allowed to continue.

Again like I told someone else try that with your power company and see how screwed up things get. The cost wasn't that much actually as most of them were on service calls. As big as Bell used to be even in the 1950' & 60's & 70's when catastrophic events hit they had to pull crews from other cities to go help out. And there is the maintenance issue. Even buried cable has problems. The cable only has so many aviable pairs to use. I do think this much was lost from the split. I think most places would be on fiber optic now in the cities had the split not happened.

You are enjoying what Bell put in 20 years ago for the most part and not much in the way of advanced technology is going on.

One thing that revolutionized phone service especially in the suburbs and rural are was the development of a small Central Office of sorts called a SLICK System. Most are now at least 20 years old. I live out in the sticks about 12 miles from the central office and on dial up I can get 49 K connects because of the SLICK. But for this to work the cables have to be kept up. The work is not the quality it used to be. How many pieces of Bell equipment do you see now with covers missing etc? The last time my dads line went out they ran a drop wire along the top of a fence row and turned it over to the cable department. They never showed up. I had a tree laying on the cable on my road and called them a few times over several years. They never came. The work from old MA Bell for the most part was quality work.

If you have ever worked in a profession that deals with answering trouble calls you know that equipment failures and other such happenings can not be scheduled. That also meant having workers willing to answer their phone at 2:00am for a call out to go service critical data line services. IF things don't change in the next few years the national phone service grid which in most places is owned by Bell will be in the same condition as Cali's power grid.

One more thing you probably didn't know. MA Bell has to run service to anyone requesting it. They have to eat the cost of getting service up to the home even if it's going up a mountain side with no prior service and for that one customer. As such it is a utility. But then again the local utility can charge you at least for the poles. Bell can't even do that. I should be so lucky the cable company would have to do the same and I finally can get off dial up.

123 posted on 03/05/2006 6:12:29 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 80 | View Replies]

To: Bogey78O
As you may know the split was a money grab by the likes of Sprint and MCI who exploited the desire of people to pay cheap long distance.

Or a judge with a grudge.

124 posted on 03/05/2006 6:13:30 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 81 | View Replies]

To: Bogey78O
We use a method called ESM to gauge employee performance. You're given a set amount of time to compelte a task. If you take 25% or more of that alotted time per job you're going to end up with punish work.

Yep and it's ridiclous too. Some things come easy enough to find and some can take a while. Also the I/R has to in many cases wait on other vendors, central office, Etc.

125 posted on 03/05/2006 6:15:40 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 83 | View Replies]

To: ASOC

No arguement from me. My dad retired craftsman. He was lucky and when ESS hit he went outside. They never offered him early retirement at any point. Many he worked with were offered it though. He stuck it out after the split till he was 65. That was about 13 years ago and not one person he worked with in his work group is still there. This was in a city as big as Tuscon probably bigger.


126 posted on 03/05/2006 6:22:41 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 94 | View Replies]

To: 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.

When strikes hit I saw my dad when it was over. The union made a mistake early in his career of threatening him to strike or else. He got sorted irked at them and did the or else the next 40 years. He didn't strike till he went back outside and even then he wasn't union. The first step supervisors loved it also. They got busted back to craft and made a lot more money because they got paid overtime. Most of the time my dad made more a year than his boss.

127 posted on 03/05/2006 6:31:23 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 117 | View Replies]

To: Trust but Verify
Whatever. You hate SBC, we've all heard it. End of discussion..

Not exactly. There are a lot of great, dedicated, hard-working people at SBC. The guys who are working in the trenches, on the poles, etc. are superb. But the leadership - Ed Whitacre and his gang in San Antonio - should be locked away.

BTW, Hal, there WAS no recession.

So much for 'end of discussion'.

128 posted on 03/05/2006 6:58:03 PM PST by HAL9000 (Get a Mac - The Ultimate FReeping Machine)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 105 | View Replies]

To: cva66snipe

I do remeber the dummy jack's ,saw a couple once, my father quick the pole climing a few yrs before I was born, work out of a CO then in downtown L.A.


129 posted on 03/05/2006 7:42:44 PM PST by markman46 (engage brain before using keyboard!!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 122 | View Replies]

To: markman46
I do remeber the dummy jack's ,saw a couple once, my father quick the pole climing a few yrs before I was born, work out of a CO then in downtown L.A.

People would not believe the amount of switching equipment a Central Office had in it. I would say the ones in LA were massive. The ones who maintained them were true craftsmen. These guys and women weren't circuit board swappers. They had to find the exact problem even down to a 50 contact relay with one contact sticking. Then they had to replace it one wire at a time all 100 of them IIRC. By the time they retired they were half deaf too LOL.

130 posted on 03/05/2006 8:03:53 PM PST by cva66snipe (If it was wrong for Clinton why do some support it for Bush? Party over nation destroys the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 129 | View Replies]

To: cva66snipe

The call was from Kentucky to Florida. No transatlantic. Probably microwave. Still, indicative of poor customer service of a monopoly.


131 posted on 03/05/2006 9:09:59 PM PST by truemiester (If the U.S. should fail, a veil of darkness will come over the Earth for a thousand years)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: cva66snipe
We had a couple P1s assigned to care for putting in the data lines and terminals at Trade St. Those guys worked their butts off. It wasn't unusual to pull a 70 hour week and they got the overtime to go with it. It was less expensive to run those guys on overtime than to expand the staff. They were competent and productive. Sometimes I needed a line pulled in when they were simply overbooked. I would pull the cable, and leave the connectors "in the wood" so they could get credit for the work...even if it was just tightening a DB-25 on the back of my UNIX machines.

I started with Pacific Telephone in 1980 as a Toll COE (first level line manager) and moved to the technical track (D22->D44) before leaving in 1991. I could have taken a D55 (equivalent to a division manager) to stay, but I saw better prospects outside PacBell. My annual income has more than doubled since 1991 and the work at my new company is much more interesting.

132 posted on 03/05/2006 9:39:49 PM PST by Myrddin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 127 | View Replies]

To: HAL9000
sorry the Main factor was Ronald Reagan pledge to stop Gov. spending as a campaign promise!
133 posted on 03/06/2006 4:50:16 AM PST by jrd
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 89 | View Replies]

To: em2vn
"SWBT was a great company but it is long gone."

Yeah. Bell Atlantic was a good company. It's been dead for years, and it ain't coming back.

134 posted on 03/06/2006 5:00:42 AM PST by Pietro
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 66 | View Replies]

To: Myrddin

Living in relatively dense area like BG/Warren County, I didn't realize how slow that phone technology has been in evolving in many areas, until I took my current job. With all the EBT customers I have on my route, got to call the vouchers in for approval, and in Larue and Green county both there are quite a lot of areas that still only have pulse dialing (no touch tone service) requiring me to use my cell phone to call the vouchers in for approval.

Even in NYC, where my grandma lives, there are a lot of old rotary pulse phones. My grandma insists on paying upwards of $50 per month for a rotary pulse phone in her flat in Brooklyn rather than get cheaper service with a modern phone. And that's with Bell Atlantic there. Note that $10 dollars per month in my grandma's case is for the phone itself, not the line, the phone...


135 posted on 03/09/2006 1:18:40 AM PST by Schwaeky ("Truth is not determined by a majority vote." Pope Benedict XVI)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 118 | View Replies]

To: Schwaeky
The BOCs started with rotary pulse to drive the step by step switches. When DTMF (TouchTone) was initially introduced, the BOCs offered it as a "premium" service. Now DTMF is the standard interface to the switch. The company actually has to speed extra money to purchase special rotary pulse receivers on the electronic switches. That is the reason for extra charges. Changing to a touchtone phone eliminates the need to purchase and maintain the rotary pulse receivers on the switch.

Your grandmother would save a bunch by owning her own instrument and using touchtone. The new policy of stopping responsibility at the "network interface" is also an issue for many people. The wiring inside the house beyond the network interface is entirely the responsbility of the customer now. Under the original Bell System, the phone company maintained responsibility for that wiring too.

136 posted on 03/09/2006 12:08:15 PM PST by Myrddin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 135 | View Replies]

To: Myrddin

That was in 2001, I don't know if my aunt and uncle or mom was able to rip that POS out of the wall and put a touch tone phone, let alone her own phone period, in place. I had to go to pay phone while there to use phone card to call my then g/f.


137 posted on 03/09/2006 12:26:22 PM PST by Schwaeky ("Truth is not determined by a majority vote." Pope Benedict XVI)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 136 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120121-137 last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson