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

[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~

[engrpat]

Great. I'm already urinated off because SBC just merged with ATT, and I have SBC Yahoo! for my DSL.

I wonder if we will be changing our email extension to ATT from SBC?

[goldstategop]

Ma Bell Being Resurrected. Film at 11.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

[j_tull]

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

[mhking]

[while standing at the entrance to the Triple Rock church watching the service with much dancing and
Hallelujah choruses, a heavenly light shines down on Jake and he has an epiphany]
Jake: The band... the band...
Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
Jake: THE BAND.
Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
Elwood: What light?
Reverend Cleophus James: HAVE YOU SEEEEN THE LIGHT?
Jake: YES. YES. JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT. 

[ssstewart]

Same here. I cut the cables from AT&T (SBC) and have been using Vonage since 2002. I won't go back to 'em, no matter how many flyers they send me saying "We want you back..."

Yea, then improve your service and drop your rates.

Suggest you try the Vonage thing, great features and interet access to voice mail, caller id, etc. AT&T saw this coming and they now offer it, but at $5 more per month than Vonage.

[em2vn]

SWBT was a great company but it is long gone.

[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

[BlackbirdSST]

Say what you will, any company has to make a profit, and consolidation is one way to increase profits.

Well, color me stupid, but if a Company has $65 Billion to toss around, I'd say their profit margins are nothing to sneeze at already. Blackbird.

[normy]

Actually SBC took over AT&T, they are using the AT&T name as a marketing ploy.

I advertise in the SBC local phone book (N. Dallas). Recently I received a call from my new representative who just moved to Texas from Connecticut(I assume for this job). I do not know what happened to my Texas guy.

After too much rude behavior and BS I told her that I was moving my dollar to a few different locally owned books because AT&T had a bad reputation and people used SBC because it was local. She smugly informed me that they had done much research and assured me that focus groups had confirmed AT&T was the name to use.

i had to laugh because i live in Plano Texas, I know my neighbors and my customers and I know SBC had a good rep and people used their books. Now that it will say AT&T people won't. I know this because I won't use them either.

My guess is that they will change to SBC after a few years.

[DaGman]

Ed Whitacre was dead serious when he became CEO of the old Southwestern Bell Corporation (later SBC and now AT&T) and said the Bell System would be put back together. No one took him seriously at the time.

[pleikumud]

It was 1984.
Telecom is still way over-regulated.

[Roccus]

Pretty good summation except for #1.
ATT was in data transmission for many years before divestiture.
Since I had been in TTY/Data repair for 14yrs at the time of divestiture, I made the mistake of going with ABI (American Bell Inc.) This later morphed into ATTIS (ATT Information Systems.) Management at ATTIS was all gung-ho about taking on Big Blue. Trouble was, they didn't know what they were doing. They hired sales people away from IBM and were taken over the coals by them in short order.

[MarkL]

Exactly... Didn't AT&T recently buy SBC, which used to be Southwestern Bell? Of course, they already owned Cingular, which used to be SBC Wireless...

So, how many of the "Baby Bells" are now a part of the "new" AT&T. Of course, they sold off Lucent, which used to be Bell Labs...

Mark

[freeangel]

Save for later

[operation clinton cleanup]

I traded in my land line for a pay as you go cell phone last September. For some reason, the phone company still sends me a monthly invoice with a zero balance. Guess they want to remind me they still are there for me!

[Trust but Verify]

The answer is that there are many new companies in the telephone business. There are cable, wireless, and internet phone providers. The only way to stay in business is to merge.

As a current employee of AT&T, this news is out-of-the-blue. I don't know if it's good or not, but whoever said Ed Whitacre should be in prison is wrong. He's a BUSINESSMAN, and as such, he is required to do what's best for the company he runs.

[Trust but Verify]

If you live in Texas there is no more local phone company than AT&T. It's simply a name change. The staffs of both companies are being merged, and of course there have been some job cuts, but as an employee of the new AT&T, there really have not been any drastic changes.

[sergeantdave]

SBC is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a telecom company. It has no problem at all engaging in fraud with its cramming scams.

It refuses to remove cramming charges from an obviously criminal operation out of Haiti. Now I need to go to small claims court and sue these jackasses. And I won't have any problem charging these jerks $100 per hour for my time.

[Bogey78O]

What pink slip? I'm not management.

[RFEngineer]

"Bell ran the most efficient ran as a utility which is what it actually was.

They could keep a big enough crew to handle anything that came up"

Well, it depends on how you measure "efficiency". Yes, a dictatorship is a very "efficient" form of government, too.

The Ma Bell that you are so nostalgic over could afford all the overhead they had because they simply rolled it into one big cost and told the government "this is what it costs to run a phone company" and the government let them charge that, plus a margin for profit.

Not only was this bad for the consumer, but it spoiled every single top manager at AT&T - they simply never learned what needed to be done to run a competitive business - That is why former AT&T executives almost to a person have been failures in any post-AT&T executive management position.

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.

The AT&T breakup was as necessary as it was inevitable. This reconsolidation will only succeed if they jettison massive numbers of staff, lose the unions and pension obligations, and invest heavily in the technology to stay ahead of smaller, but highly scalable competitors. I doubt that they can pull it off, given where they've come from and the business models they created for themselves, but it will be fun to see them try.