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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."
"AT&T puts into motion plans to acquire Bellsouth."
Hurray for fucking retard editors who can't be bothered to check headlines for accuracy.
Of the original breakup anyway? The baby bells are buying each other and Ma bell.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
War!
The Republic, with the help of its Jedi soothsayers, foresaw trouble ahead, leaving Ma Bell in one piece and to her own devices. Ma Bell fought back with all her might, but was torn to pieces by the deadly lightsabers of the Republic.
Several decades later, inefficiencies in having separate phone systems have led to the collaboration of those separated parts. Their merger begins anew their gradual domination of the Republic's phone systems. This time, the Republic isn't so concerned.
Give it a year or two, and Ma Bell will be back, only without the cool bits this time (Bell Labs).
I for one welcome our "Old Is New Again" phone overlords.
When do I sign up for actually renting my telephone again?
*sigh*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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
Then they'll be regulated as a monopoly because no one will be able to argue with a straight face that there is a free market for telecoms. With monopoly status, they won't be able to argue that they are being forced to cut their prices down to unsustainable levels. Cheap broadband is nice and all, but if it's too cheap they aren't making enough money to support their infrastructure which is why access sucks in most of the country. As I've been saying, I'd rather they charge me $100/month for real 3mpbs up AND down than charge me $15-$40 a month for 3mpbs with an invisible cap on its monthly use. It makes more sense for them too. If they provide the bandwidth each month, Apple and others can provide the content which makes their service worth paying a premium for.
The inverse of that worked pretty well for the antitrust Microsoft trial.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Just like before the breakup...minus regulation.
It does bother me quite a bit that they will have near total control of the DSL market.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
The prevailing thought in the anti-trust/economics literature is that consolidation is generally regarded as a good thing in cellular..
Basically, there are massive density economies in delivering cellular service (e.g. it's better to use a higher percentage of the capacity of one expensive tower vs. having four separate expensive towers running at lower utilization rates), and as such, there are efficiency gains that can come out of such mergers. We're more likely to see continuing consolidation in national cellular markets with a much bigger space for international competition. The companies want to move forward with consolidation, and the anti-trust authorities aren't really standing in their way.
In the US, the anti-trust people really only care about post-merger consumer prices (rather than the increased profitability of the merged entity). The degree of substitutable goods and the nature of price competition in cellular markets seems to keep downward pressure on rates. This is why they are letting all this go through.
As for VOIP (and the greater economy), you only need two firms to get good competitive results from these types of goods. Landline phones and VOIP are essentially homogenous products, and as such, it's perfectly logical to assume that people will go with the firm that offers them the best price/quality ratio. Outside of collusion, odds are good that you will see competition putting downward pressure on prices in landline telephony even if both landlines and VOIP are delivered by monopolies.
Where is the line to start the fight?
Fax or Call your Congressional Representatives.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cdirectory/index.html
Drop these guys a line.
http://ftc.gov/
If you are intelligent and well spoken... call your local news and make a case for this being a bad idea.
Or, if you want to be an ineffective lump, go ahead and sit back and shut up... If you're going to complain, for god's sake aim your mouth in the right direction.
I challenge every voting Slashdot reader to actually do something about this one and send a fax in tomorrow. E-mail can be filtered and ignored, but choking the phone lines that serve them will serve as an ironic way of showing how unhappy we are with the prospect of this merger.
I am a customer of these organizations and I want this stopped in it's tracks.
Four years ago I made the mistake of signing up w/ AT&T. I cancled and paid off my bill (something like $14). Now, every four months I start getting bills, then the calls. I ignore them till they catch me. Then I ask for immediate acceleration. If I don't get it I curse a little (I've been doing this 3x/yr for 4 years now -- I'm not normally an asshole). Eventually someone says they see the problem and correct it. Every time I'm told this. And inevitably, the bills come back. Last time, when the person was through "fixing" it (I've since started getting bills again), she asked if I was interested in signing up for service. I laughed.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Today, if you walked into a RBOC and asked to buy/lease local loops or rackspace, they'd have to let you.
Not since 2002, that was overturned. source
Judge Green must be rolling in his grave.
T-1000
Shit.
Less competition = less push for innovation, higher prices, and every reason Bell was broken up in the first place.
No, it was broken up because of an antitrust suit brought by MCI. The sad part was that AT&T was one of the most innovative companies in the world. Witness the transistor - a Bell Labs product. If anything, the monopoly hurt them because they were not (because of regulations) allowed to take advantage of their innovations outside of the telephone market.
What they did have was something that's been dropped - service. You needed a phone installed, it was done, and done quickly. Have a problem? Fixed. Need to talk to someone about an issue? There was someone on the end of the line. Compare that today's "advantages". Need a phone installed? Wait a week or two. Got a problem with your line? Maybe they'll get around to fixing it in the next month. Have a problem with your bill, or need to talk to someone about an issue with your phone service? Welcome to the support hell of pushing buttons, listening to recorded messages, pushing more buttons, and maybe at the end of it you'll get to talk to someone who may speak English. (sarcasm) Oh yeah, we're so much better off!(/sarcasm)
Except VOIP depends on internet service, which is provided by the phone company competing with that VOIP...
While you make an elegant argument, you forget that AT&T will control a significant portion of the DSL market, which would allow AT&T to set forth the same anti-trust/anti-competitive behavior (by filtering VoIP data).
Not to mention AT&T would then have control of the bigger half of cellular customers in America (Cingular/AT&T Wireless). The last step would be their re-acquisition of Verizon (which would be epic at this point, as Verizon just acquired MCI, which was one of the companies AT&T flagged as a "competitor" in their earlier anti-trust proceedings).
So as a consumer, I can see this leading down a very dark road for consumers.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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)
If Verizon buys Qwest, we're down to two phone companies!
Penny - plain text accounting
I find your lack of faith... disturbing.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
Hey, what about online petitions? Those work great.
The 1981 breakup gave the Baby Bells "local dialtone" and big AT&T (and others) "long distance." Now that the technology has all changed, this line of demarcation is obsolete.
It's time for another breakup, and this time it should go as follows: the RBOC's (soon to be the One Big BOC) maintain the physical cable plant, and they maintain the central offices basically as colocation facilities. Then, you have carriers (none of which are allowed to be RBOC's [or the imminent One Big BOC]) as colocation customers in those central offices. They lease customer loops from the BOC/LEC/whatever and then they provide "telecom services" over those loops. We don't care what the services are -- dial tone, DSL, whatever. No distinction between voice and data, between local and long distance, whatever, because as we know, it's all the same crap now.
THAT is the perfect way to keep the government-granted monopoly working efficiently for consumers. The monopoly must extend only as far as it needs to, and no further.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Not even close. The biggest thing is competition in the local phone market. Now the copper-loop provider competes in more and more markets with the cable provider, and is starting to compete with the power provider. Soon new providers may be offering Wireless Local Loop. AT&T also is far from having a monopoly on long-fiber: gas companies, power companies - even Google - have that stuff. It is this type of inter-modal competition that means it makes sense to merge. You have to bulk-up to compete. Not merging would be suicide.
At the end of the day, it is very likely the consumer will buy all of their communications products (voice, video, data, and mobile) from a single provider, and competition will be in the bundle. If providers don't offer all four, buying from them will make about as much sense is a buying from a car maker that sold the entire car minus the wheels and seats.
It is in fact de-regulation and intense competition that make this move necessary.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
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.
Bush is the president - responsible for running the country. The cruel irony is that Bush can be described only as irresponsible.
Bush was warned about Katrina's risk of flooding New Orleans, went on vacation instead, and resurfaced long enough to lie about no one anticipating the levees would fail.
He was warned about Global Warming, and instead has his administration gagging NASA scientists while presiding over the biggest increases in Greenhouse emissions ever. Now the ice is melting even faster than the scientists predicted.
Bush took office with Microsoft ruled a monopoly, and his Justice Department let them continue unabated. The years since have seen continuing abuses, but only foreign courts are doing anything about it, because Bush won't do anything to protect the market. A market that has remained unsafe for new competitors during his stewardship.
Bush was warned that Iraq would collapse into civil war, and now acts like its just a nasty surprise - while he isn't denying it's happening. He got a daily intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US", after repeated warnings from Clinton's outgoing team and Clarke, the counterterrorism administrator who stayed on. Then he acted surprised when his deprioritization collected the 9/11/2001 planebombings. He was warned before N. Korea got the bomb, before Iran got the bomb, that cutting taxes on the rich would keep the regular economy moribund, that screwing with the Mideast would keep oil prices sky-high.
So maybe you know something about Bush and the Superbowl that we haven't heard yet. Anonymous Cheney, is that you? Shouldn't you be at target practice, or something?
--
make install -not war
Funny, the original death star (see the AT&T logo) was destroyed nearly 22 years ago. Now, a new one is being built, right in front of our faces.
What the hell did they break up Ma Bell for if they are just going to let it corporate merge itself back together?
How ya like dat?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did ATT deny MCI, Sprint, ITT, sonitrol, and everyone else involved access to their lines?
Yep.
Was MCI a giant grasping hellhole bent not on defeating ATT, but becoming ATT?
Yep.
Was Sprint an incompetent bunch of losers who couldn't find their own butts with a flashlight, a map, and both hands at the ready?
Yep.
Was Sonitrol along for the ride?
Yep.
Was ITT a vast corrupt corporation run by thugs?
Yep.
It's all there in the evidence - which fills a freakin' warehouse somewhere. Representatives of ITT threating people, Sprint incapable of figuring out how to bill their customers, MCI pulling all kinds of nasty shenanigans on ATT and other providers - and ream after ream of circuit listings noting that the denial of service was for "Reasons Unknown" - it was ugly. Truly nasty. There were no good guys in that case.
And now ATT wants to rebuild its empire. Well, it's a different world now with VOIP, Cellphones, cable modems, etc. Even if they do corner the DSL market, there's another market out there...
I don't if I should laugh or cry for all my wasted effort in that messy trial.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It is in fact de-regulation and intense competition that make this move necessary.
I find this pretty implausible. If they were actually facing real competition, wouldn't they suck slightly less?
The trick is that AT&T was broken up BECAUSE of the TYPE of regulation they were under. When AT&T created a "phone system" (Panel, Crossbar, ESS), they designed it for at LEAST 20 years. 20 years ago we were amazed by the "New 386". This was mostly the result of the regulated ROI. Yes they made things to LAST, but they HAD to. They NEED to have a good incentive for FASTER turnover, MORE innovation. MCI and Sprint came along and sold only to the lucrative long distance market, AT&T's bread & buttter. The Long distance market used to help PAY FOR local service. It was set up that way. When the lawsuits started piling up against AT&T, Charlie Brown decided "forget it". He took the chance that the "Bell Children" would be profitable because they would be mostly deregulated. He was right.
This does not mean that "the New AT&T" will do us any good. Without SOME sort of regulation, we're done for. ALSO, you all forget that Verizon *IS* the other "BIG" comprtitior --> GTE. And YES, they are "fated" to merge. Eliminating ALL "big" phone companies, and getting back to one. But we NEED them to be REGULATED. SERVICE was ALL the old AT&T cared about. It was 1,2, & 3 of the top five things they worked toward. We also have to let them make money off their inventions. The old rules did not allow that.
The key to all of this is creating regulation that REWARDS innovation. Bell labs did the transistor, the first work on disk drives, the LASER (independently, but later than Gordon Gould), TELSTAR, and on and on. Without the proper fiscal incentives, innovation will "not be worth it", from THEIR point of view.
Without innovation, we ALL lose, BIG-TIME.
I think this can be a good thing, if we do it right. I also think it is inevitable. The ONE thing we have to LOSE if the 1980's mentality. Greed is NOT good. If we have a single Bell system, and pay the CEO $100 MILLION a year, we are done for. [By modern scales the CEO of the largest company in the world is worth $100 Mil. We cannot have that kind of thinking.]