New AT&T Acquires BellSouth 406
spune writes "Only months after SBC's acquisition of AT&T last November, the newly rechristened telecom has announced that it plans to buy fellow Baby Bell BellSouth Inc, of Atlanta, Georgia for $67 billion. This action by AT&T will consolidate more than half of the original Bell System into a single entity, leaving only Verizon and Qwest as remaining Bell family competitors. Analysts predict this deal will be approved by the FCC with only minor restrictions on the new company, which will serve residences and businesses from California to Florida."
Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They're trying to get it done quick. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now sure, they're under contract, but what happens when those contracts run out? Will we see another @Home debacle while the cable co's scramble to replace their uplinks, and ultimately end up paying a lot more for comparable connections and as a result, end up being forced to charge a helluva lot more to provide the same services?
Inevitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the most corrupt forms of merchantilism, these monopolies insulate the phone companies from competition and create the environment for them to simply buy each other all over again.
The only thing Judge Green would have needed to do all those years ago was repeal (and prevent the states from reestablishing) monopoly protection of AT&T. Let competition come in where ever the established service provider was not providing decent service, or was charging too much, or anything and everything else that different providers use to compete for your, and my, business.
But no, the regulators wouldn't release even slightly their death-grip on the phone systems, not really, so local monopoly grants continued. Now they're buying each other and the "anti-monopoly" types have the gall to act surprised.
There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly. Even Microsoft must continually innovate (or at least make people think that they innovate) in order to keep their customers. Only government is able to grant monopoly status, as was done with railroads, electric utilities, telephones. If some company is dominant in a field without those legal grants, they can only do so because they serve the customers better than their competition.
I don't mean "provide better service", because even as Windows came to dominate I was already using Linux and understood that Windows was not providing "better service". I mean serving their customers better, by better serving their subjective wants whether an outsider would consider them objectively "better" served or not.
Bob-
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, when you buy a SpeakEasy line, that's what happens. You buy the line from SE. SE buys a slot on the local DSLAM and pays to have it connected to your loop. Because SE is buying 1000 lines at a time, they can get them cheaper than if you bought it directly from your RBOC.
Cingular Wireless to be rebranded too (Score:3, Interesting)
From MSNBC [msn.com]: After spending millions of dollars to rebrand AT&T Wireless Services Inc. stores as Cingular stores and hundreds of millions of dollars more on marketing the new Cingular after its $41 billion acquisition of AT&T Wireless in October 2004, Cingular will now become AT&T if the merger with BellSouth is completed.
So for all of those who at one time had AT&T Wireless as your cell provider and stuck with them through the Cingular Wireless purchase and are still with them, you'll now be moved back to the (new) AT&T brand. I would have been one of them had my compnay not switched to T-Mobile 3 weeks ago.
Re:Problem with that logic... (Score:2, Interesting)
When a company begins to own more than one component of the system, free markets go bye-bye.
Something similar is occurring right now in the midwest with livestock operations. Food packing companies are attempting to buy out local farming operations, thereby cutting brokers out and removing much of the commodity nature of the industry. One step closer to monopolistic reign.
This deal might just bring down SBC! (Score:5, Interesting)
My mother worked in their payphone operation division. They were so incompetent, that that division went under in 2003. BellSouth couldn't even keep their own damn payphones working. According to my mother, at one time in her area over 40% of the BellSouth payphones were inoperable due to BellSouth problems. Payphones were first made in 1891, and BellSouth couldn't even keep that 100+ year-old technology working. Because of that my mother now works as a cashier in a grocery store.
About the billing. They bill us about 20 times (not a typo) what they actually should. I have an employee that spends almost full-time dealing with their billing screw-ups. WorldCom used to inflate billing like that...right before their billing claims were exposed a complete fraud. BellSouth certainly seems to be headed the same way.
You can summarize BellSouth by the outdated or inferior equipment, a very incompetent workforce due to layoffs and early retirement, substandard wiring, and inflated billing. I don't see this going well at all for SBC.
Not quite (Score:3, Interesting)
The really scary part is the recent FCC decision to classify DSL as an "information service" that does not have to support independent ISPs at all, a decision that gives the Bell operating companies free a complete exemption from common carrier rules that were written to prevent Ma Bell from engaging in precisely the type of behavior that the FCC decided to give them free reign to engage in. Things like blocking or degrading anything they feel like for example. The FCCs current discussion about Internet discrimination is mostly a bunch of hot air, because they exempted the RBOCs from the very laws designed to prevent stuff like that.
2600 had a nice cover about this (Score:4, Interesting)
Crazy that is was a year and a half ago. But still pretty topical. And I'm pretty sure those of us old enough to remember the days of many RBOC's can identify with the statement.
Re:Problem with that logic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Cingular and Verizon already lease tower space from each other to cut down on costs?
In this case, density economics don't play anywhere nearly as big of a factor.
Re:Breakup was along the wrong lines. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Member-owned cooperative (Score:5, Interesting)
The service costs less, and after the infrastructure and upgrades are paid for, I get a check back every year. Plus, we get to vote on stuff, and we own the company.
Only way to go, IMO.
Re:Problem with that logic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps now the nature of recent attempts to create a tiered internet is revealed as a stalking horse.
Since these guys are going to have to make some sort of "compromises" in order to pass regulatory scrutiny, what better compromise than to sacrifice something they don't have anyway? Make a bunch of noise about multi-tiering and then tell the FCC that they will support a law that explicitly makes tier-type pricing illegal. Then ReBell (short for Resurrection of Ma Bell) gets to proceed with the merger(s), and the cable companies are now prevented from pursuing tiered internet pricing as part of said hypothetical law,
I see the future.... (Score:3, Interesting)
GJC
Re:Inevitable. (Score:2, Interesting)
>investment, you'll be somehow raising that money from customers who have the
>choice between your network, and the cheaper incumbent.
>
>How the FUCK do you compete with that?
Actually, competing with that isn't that difficult right now. What most folks who live in large urban areas don't realize is that in many smaller cities and towns, the phone, cable, and electrical lines are owned by a small private company or the local government. This ownership provides a strong basis (local support and adoption) for innovation.
For example, I'm aware of several townships in Ohio right now that are receiving Fiber to the Home and have been for several months or years. Businesses come in, do an RFP, and submit a bid. The relatively low cost of implementation generally only requires a 15%-25% subsriber rate to give a reasonable ROI, and the consumers get a single wire coming in to their homes that provides not only digital telephony and HDTV, but realistic videoconferencing and 100Mbps Internet access.
Lots of people want to build competitive networks. And they're doing so at this moment. While I accept (while strongly disagreeing with) your philosophy that government regulation is the answer to this and other issues, I take objection to your ignorance or deliberate FUD in saying that the current system includes neither competition nor innovation.
I'm all for this as long as... (Score:3, Interesting)
The new SBC, ATT, Bellsouth, Cingular, whatever will run fiber to my house like Verizon is doing [wikipedia.org].
Their current Project Lightspeed [sbc.com] is dead before arrival.
Will it matter, though? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just outside the city limits- about 3 blocks. There's only 2 DSL points...CLECS?...in this town of 250,000. The second one is on the other side of town, and useless to me. I'm stuck with fiber-backboned cable, so I'm thankful the only choice is at least a good one.
Now...my brother.
He lives three miles west of me. Out there, it's farmland. Deer are seen _every_night_ that he goes home. Huge "shredded wheat" rolls are parked here and there, and everyone knows what brand of tractor they have, and want. Everyone knows the county extension agent, even if they don't farm- he's a neighbor, too.
However, HE CAN'T GET DSL...not because he's even farther from the DSL point than I...but because, in his rural pastureland, his telephone service is based on FIBER OPTICS, and SBC won't let him tap into it, nor to use the increasingly-vacant copper lines to "leased-line-it" to my house. He's stuck on dialup at best, while we try to build towers and get an RF link up.
Do you see the irony here? He can't get basic internet, because his farmland technology has outpaced mine in the city somehow. WTF?
The company (and it's descendants) who built their industry on connecting people have two situations, very prevelant ones, in which they can't connect people. This isn't a technical problem, it's a policy problem.
"The Innovator's Delima", perhaps?
I spent a lot of time hating the old AT&T, not trusting that their components were really different somehow. My insticts are that we're all going to hate them, again.
Re:Southwestern Bell, AT&T, and BellSouth (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to live in Radnor Township just outside Philadelphia, and verizon spent an entire summer ripping up my neighborhood to install fiber everywhere. That was 4 years ago, and that fiber is still dark. Verizon has told me that they have no plans of ever lighting it up.
Verizon was GTE not AT&T (Score:2, Interesting)