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AT&T to Leave Residential Business
Herve writes "Just got it from a press release on the AT&T website: 'AT&T will no longer be competing for residential local and standalone long distance customers. The company stressed that existing residential customers will continue to receive the quality service they expect from AT&T; however, the company will no longer be investing to acquire new customers in this segment.'"
I just got a holographic postcard that must have cost a buck each from them advertising their *residential* VoIP service. Maybe they don't want to raise the ire of the feds and their competitors by saying "Hey everybody we were given a thorough beating with a clue stick and now realize that digital delivery to the end user is the way to go."
The end of analog phone service is here.
This spells a desolate future for AT&T residential subscribers. When a company isn't actively going after business, they aren't actively *keeping* business, and therefore the quality of service rapidly declines until that segment is folded. I give it two years of hell and then a skillful withdrawal from the residential market.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Their phone calls were annoying, and after an experience with three consecutive rude customer service people back in 2000 I swore I would never do business with their consumer arm again.
My grandfather and uncle were both Western Electric engineers, so it's kind of in the family working for AT&T (their part went to Lucent). After the breakup it was all over for that company, they couldn't do anything right. PC marketing, Unix marketing, selling leased lines, every time I dealt with AT&T it was a hassle and they were inferior to their competition.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Competition is just doing its job. :)
Not exactly. Twenty years ago, ATT was THE phone company, encompassing what Verizon, SBC, Qwest, etc., are today. When they were split up, all those companies could only do local phone service, and ATT was the long distance company.
Now everything's been all jumbled up, and everybody can do everything. So this incarnation of ATT is more like MCI or Sprint than it is Qwest or Verizon.
Could this be the end of Carrot Top's carreer?
If you are still using AT&T for home phone service, you deserve what you get. This should give these folks the impetus to go out and shop around. Using AT&T for phone service is like using AOL or MSN for internet access (at least from a price perspective). There are soooo many better deals available, why would you even want to use AT&T?
The execs are just reading the tea leaves here, and they have decided that they can't compete. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
After working there 21 years, it was easy to see that the company had become just a shadow of its former self. There's not much left other than the name. People still associate the name with the 1.1 million employee behemoth that it used to be. Back in the day, doing things right was the way things got done. Now, at less than 60k employees, saying its done is job one, and making it work (or not) is an afterthought. It's really sad.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
In the press release, ATT seems to justify this decision by saying that:
According to industry estimates, more than 40% of American households have now migrated to some combination of bundled communications services. Recent regulatory decisions make it financially infeasible for AT&T to offer a competitive bundle of services to consumers. AT&T has determined that it cannot effectively compete against bundled competition by selling only standalone LD.
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold AT&T Broadband.
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Since divestiture in the 80's, technical expertise took a second seat to
climbing the managerial org chart. PHB MBAs rose to the level of their
incompetency, and investment in the future was traded for the next quarter's
profit numbers. Real talent, the people that actually invented things and
did the creative work, either retired or left for greener pastures.
AT&T had deep enough pockets, so they could stumble around and
sell off assets for almost twenty years. It's finally reached the point that
that business model can no longer sustain itself. Shame really.
One Bell System. It Worked.
Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend?
in a nutshell? Poor Management.
They made really bone-headed decisions. They bought TCI an dother cable companies in an attempt to get into the cable biz but lacked the management that understood cable (and let go all the top management from those cable companies.) They acquired MediaOne cable in 2000 and that caused a HUGE amount of infighting because the mediaOne people were not made to conform and join the team which created a huge us/them inside the company further ripping it apart until Comcast acquired the cable arm and started to fix what was wrong.
Their advertising wing switched form giving the company a good image to the annoy everyone to hell with telemarketing. They refuse to keep tight reigns on their telemarketing companies so slamming by AT&T is a common occourance.
Overall the management of AT&T is watching the company spiral the drain and have no idea how to fix it.
It's the same cause at every failed company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A very, VERY big part of it was losing the biggest single phone contract in the world, the United States Government FTS (Federal Telephone Service), to MCI a few years ago.
It is the maintenance of this contract that has kept MCI afloat despite its woes and which, coupled with AT&T's rapid expansion (TCI, etc.), has led to AT&T's dramatic fall in the residential marketplace.
I would also guess that the extreme growth in cellphone and DSL use has hurt AT&T, since more and more people are using those technologies instead of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for home use.
AT&T felt that current regulations for the Baby Bells favored the Baby Bells in areas which they held monopolies. At the same time Baby Bells are being allowed to offer long distance, AT&T feels the rates Baby Bells charge them put them at a competitive disadvantage.
If what AT&T says is true, I would get out of the business too.
The number of US landline phones declined by 5 million since 2000, while 7.5 million people overall have made the switch to exclusive cellphone use in the US.
Some Stats
good political satire
A big part of the reason for that is that the Bell Labs division went to Lucent when it split off. I think it's terrible that Lucent is on it's last legs, most people have no idea how many innovations came out of that group of people.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
The phone company generated a lot of ill will amongst their customers-with-no-choice in the 60's and 70's (see Lily Tomlin's character, Ernestine) altho their stock was always considered a good stable investment that you could pass on to your children. If history is any guide, and it often is NOT, we just might see this same pattern of crumbling happen to Msft in 20/30 years, if not sooner - a great investment, but lots of PO'd customers. Once the customers wise up to what's going on and seek better alternatives those vast monopoly profits won't be guarenteed.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Since I dumped AT&T's long distance, they have been mercelessly and relentlessly calling and begging me to come back. Since I had a prior business relationship, it doesn't matter that I'm on every do-not-call list I know of. They can still legally annoy me for 18 months. It also doesn't matter that I tell them to take me off their list and stop calling. They're still trying to endear themselves to me. Might work.
As for VoIP, I'll keep my POTS a while longer. A year or so ago, 40% of all public IP traffic was spam sent by wide open brodaband zombie PCs. Now, it's at least 70%. See a trend here?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Thoolie asks...
"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"
There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.
For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.
Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.
Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.
While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.
From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.
Happy hunting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I have a $40/month plan that allows me unlimited calls to the UK (24/7). I've not yet found anyone else that has such a plan...
When AT&T will no longer be competing for residential local and standalone long distance customers...
...that's mLife
(Does this make me a troll?)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Thank heavens for this, maybe more people will be spared the hell I had to go through with that bastard of a company.
I had AT&T when I moved to my first apartment out of college. I had had them for college long-distance and thought it was ok, not knowing better. After a year of struggling whenever I wanted to switch plans or adjust information on my bill, and constantly getting phone calls from them for different services, I decided when I moved to my current house, AT&T would be taken out with the garbage.
So, I cancelled 2 weeks before I left the apartment (with a long and arduous phone call with a really nasty, nasty woman) and signed up with Sprint (who were and continue to be just as friendly and helpful as heck). For 4 months after I moved and my long distance had switched, I still got bills from AT&T...mostly just the minimum, but it started building up. I got nasty letters telling me about collection, lawyers, etc. So I sent back a nasty letter, detailing that I had cancelled, if they'd check their damned records, and there was no way in hell I would pay anything.
An apologetic letter arrived that stated that they'd be glad to terminate my account and my balance would be erased. Well, good.
6 months later, I receive a bill from AT&T. $0.00 owed. I throw it in the trash. Six months from that, the same thing...zero dollars owed, thanks for being a great customer. More head scratching followed, paper wafts towards circular file.
I haven't lived at the apartment for 4 years now -- the phone number changed when I moved to my new house and it hasn't been reused for anyone. About every 6 months I still receive a bill from them for $0 that I look at, giggle, and then throw in the trash, amused at the sheer stupidity of it all.
Blog,Twitter
They sent me a bunch of bills for zero as well. So I sent them a check for zero dollars. The bills stopped. Maybe it'll work for you too.
"Life is such a sweet insanity, the more you learn, the less you know"
When the phone companies were split up, I retained my AT&T long distance account out of habit and inertia. One day my bank offered free trials of their online bill-paying service, so I tried it out, with no problems with any company--except AT&T.
The service says to allow one week for payment. I authorize payment THREE weeks before the bill is due. Online screen shows bill as "paid" TWO weeks before it is due. AT&T claimed the payment was two days late. After a lot of phone calls the bank got me an image of the cancelled check showing it was, in fact, cashed ONE week before the bill was due. Got that?
Now get this. Remember, this is the first month I'm using the online bill-paying service, and have never paid a bill late before (in something like twenty years), didn't pay this one late, and even at the beginning AT&T acknowledged having received payment.
I start getting obnoxious calls every evening from a collection agency.
Even after AT&T acknowledges that the bill was paid, the collection agency keeps calling.
Even after AT&T says the collection service has been told to stop, it keeps calling. (The collection agency, or at any rate the people who are calling me, say they have no record that AT&T has told them to stop).
Even after I mail the collection service full documentation of everything, including screen shots of the bank's online bill-paying records and the image of the cancelled check, they keep calling and people at the collection agency tell me they have received the records and everything is OK, the collection agency keeps calling. (The people who are calling claim not to have been told to stop by the people at the agency who acknowledged receiving the records).
EVENTUALLY they do stop.
At this point I'm a tiny little bit furious so I fire off an angry letter to the office of the president of AT&T telling the story, opining that a refund of the month's bill would be fair recompense for my bad treatment and that if they'll do that we'll call it even and I'll stay with AT&T.
I get a phone call on my answering machine from the president's office saying they completely understand and agree are sorry it all happened and they will send me a check for $65 and want to keep me as a customer.
The check doesn't arrive.
Here is a company that could have easily kept me as a customer. The only, single, solitary thing they needed to do was not to actively drive me away.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
One word, 'transistor'. AT&T when they were a monopoly arguably the best R&D, Bell Labs. The thing with R&D is you're basically paying a bunch of smart people to go play and use their imagination. So you have these people who probably come up with a few thousand ideas that amount to crap and occasionally come up with something like the transistor. Thats really hard for a bean counter to reconcile. They traded that for several years of profits but nothing really new, Who knows what Bell Labs may have come up with that AT&T would have had the rights to.
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
If AT&T had never been split up, I think we would still be making calls using a big rotory dial phone. Or you could pay $5 a month extra for tone dialing. Long distance would be $1 a minute. DSL would be unheard of. Sure this would all be federally regulated, but it's not hard to convince the regulators to let you raise rates as long as you put together a business case for it. Despite some of the headaches, deregulation is the best thing to ever happen to telecom. It worked out well for many companies, and would even have benefitted AT&T if they hadn't enormously screwed up.
I just canceled a long term agreement to use AT&T for my long distance carrier, and went to the Freedom plan from Verizon.
Why?
1. The about 30 minutes a month we were using cost as much or more in the average month.
2. I pay my bills online. 3 months ago I scheduled their payment to go out 7 days ahead of the due date, a standard practice.
The check got there a couple of days past the due date and some asshole turned it over to a collection agency, who was of course out of state. They called me at 8:55 pm 3 different days to rag and otherwise irritate me into paying a measely $47 bill that I already had a bank statement showing it had been paid, and AT&T themselves told me that it had been paid when I called them. The collectors people were the most obnoxious people I've tangled with on the phone in a decade or more, and I used up most of a 15 minute monolog's worth of swear words discussing their geneology with them. It took over 2 months to get that collector off my back and that forever turned any inclination I had for AT&T's service off forever.
AT&T was a fine, long term business, till some jerks managed to get themselves jobs in accounts receivable. AT&T should either prepare to sink in the long term view, or do some weeding in accounts receivable. Either way, they are going to do it without me, who has been a customer of theirs for 69 years.
Cheers, Gene
Not to mention the $150/month it cost to rent an answering machine in the mid 70's.
OTOH, those extortionate prices the government allowed them to charge came with a catch: universal phone service. AT&T had to wire every home and business that wanted phone service, anywhere in the country, no matter how much it cost. If the phone system was always the anarchic mosh pit it is today, large amounts of the country would never have been wired.
(Think of the places that still don't have cable, both remote areas too far from anything, and inner cities where the cable company isn't willing to dig up the streets to wire up the last few buildings.)
Everybody seems to be missing the reason for this.
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b =wn&q=fcc+bush+telecom+act+1996&btnG=Search+Ne ws
While their service sucked AND they were annoying us with switch calls the real culprit was Bush and the FCC.
http://gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/26319-1.htm
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&ta
They got rid of the regulations about unbundling the local copper so the local carrier can charge AT&T whatever they want.
Expect others to leave that market soon as well.
"You heard it here first: the voice business is dead. Repeat: it's not even a commodity; it's doomed. The telcos know it, too." [Wired 3.07]
It panned out to this - just 10 years later.
because all they're doing is substituting SBC/etc's marketing and accounting weasles for their own. It's the same network, they just give you an additional point of failure for no significant benefit.
Cell phone companies have their own networks. Cable companies doing telephone service have their own network. Reselling a regulated monopoly's service and calling it "choice" is a joke.
Hey AT&T: take your $billions and build us fiber-to-the-home (or close as you can) high-speed Internet access. THAT I'd pay for. But you've probably pissed away too much cash to do that at this point and were never smart enough to begin with.
As it happened, my wife's friend took a turn for the worse and we spent 4 to six hours on the phone over the course of a few days talking over whatever it is she needed to "express" (women...). My wife used the 1-800-CALL-ATT number, telling them to bill the LD to our home phone. Imagine my shock and horror when the AT&T bill arrived singing a tune of almost $700. The heartless bastards had no mercy... any and all pleading for mercy ended "Well... that's what you owe us... pay up or else." It took me 3 months to get them to knock a couple hundred off just to close the matter out, but it was their deceptive advertising that caused the problem in the forst place.
May AT&T's corporate soul, if it still has one, rot in corporate hell.
One investment firm derated their stock to "junk bond" status, joining the ranks of once-mighty firms like Charter Cable. Another firm's report has labeled the company as a "prospect for a takeover, or buyout".
IMHO, if they don't do something mighty desparate here shortly, they will be permantenly mired in the red with no way out of it except for selling out, or bankruptcy.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Am I the ONLY one here that has actually used AT&T local service? (as in they were my carrier for local-only calls) Everyone is spouting about their long distance service, which I have never used, but I have been an AT&T local service customer for the past two years.
Over the years I had become so disgusted from my dealings with Ameritech/SBC that when I heard AT&T was providing local service in my area, I signed up right away. I figured ANYTHING had to be better than SBC. I had always found SBC/Ameritech's customer service reps to be rude, incompetant and just plain lazy. It was commonplace to have to call back multiple times to have a change made because the reps simply didn't do their jobs. And before you could hang up they would hound you like vultures trying to get you to buy their stupid add-on services.
Being an AT&T customer was an enlightening experience. Every single time I called them for any reason the representative was very polite and efficient. They were so good I even went out of my way to report one of their reps for being so helpful and nice. The price was the same as SBC +/- $1. I had my bill automatically charged to my credit card each month and never had a problem in two years. (trying cc billing with Ameritech resulting in getting overbilled and I had to discontinue it).
In short, AT&T local service was like the opposite of Ameritech/SBC. AT&T represented everything I wanted from a phone company. After two years with them I cancelled my service last month only because I'm moving and I'm going to be without a phone for a while, but I was sorry I had to leave them, and I'll be bummed if I wont be able to sign up for their local services at my new place.
This company is the father of the Linux you all love to use today.
Not necessarily. Had MIT installed a different proprietary OS in 1984, Stallman would have become fed up with its publisher's policies and would have based GNU on that rather than on UNIX, giving it a different acronym. The Christmas tree guy who wrote the Minix book would probably have cloned some other kernel as well.