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New AT&T Acquires BellSouth
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."
What really has me kinda worried, "AT&T" will now have a *very* substantial portion of the DSL market under their thumb. A lot of smaller (and some larger) cable modem providers are getting their upstream lines from AT&T Broadband.
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?
The old AT&T government granted monopoly was never really ended. The so-called Baby Bells maintained government granted monopoly status over their respective regions, a monopoly status that is still in place.
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-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
As the owner of the oldest ISP in South Carolina, I can honestly say that BellSouth's is full of crap about their estimated value of their lines and billing. We have 63 locations in Georgia, NC, and SC now, and in almost all of the locations, BellSouth struggled to even connect a simple T1. Very often, they had trouble even delivering a few POTS lines. Yes, we still offer 33.6 dialup in many areas since BellSouth is too incompetent to configure some of their switches to handle PRI. The only employees they have left have no experience and most are simply incompetent. My grandfather, father, and two of my brothers worked as repairmen for them. They've all retired or retired early. The only people still on the payroll have no idea what they're doing. They can't even troubleshoot simple POTS lines. Most of their local copper lines are complete crap. BellSouth really started cutting corners on the quality of their wires in the mid 80's. When looking for new locations to open a POP, I go to buildings built before 1980 since they have much better wiring to the building than the newer BellSouth garbage.
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 - the decision that you are referring to said that RBOCs did not have to share the *same* copper pair with DSL providers. CLECs can still get their own lines.
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.
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.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Mod parent up! What you just described is *exactly* what the UK government forced upon BT, and the UK enjoys some of the lowest rates and highest penetration for broadband in the world. We should use the BT divestiture as a model for this country...
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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.