Not worth it to me. If they had it around $1-$2 I’d be all over it.

One thing I read on a blog somewhere was a restriction regulators may put on AT&T to allow the BellSouth purchase to go forward would be to split off Cingular into a separate company.

Qwest was one of the bidders in the MCI deal, and was screwed by the MCI shareholders who accepted a lesser deal to go over to Verizon. If anyone acquires Qwest, I doubt it’ll be Verizon since there is no love lost there.

Not too long ago Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless, which spun off of AT&T in 2001. Now SBC just acquired AT&T, and took the AT&T name, is one of the companies controlling Cingular – and looking to acquire BellSouth, one of the other baby bells, the other parent. Ma Bell rises again. All the Baby Bells are being combined – NY Tel and New England Tell became NYNEX, merging with others into Bell Atlantic, which merged with GTE (never a Baby Bell, GTE was an independent phone company outside of AT&T even way back) into Verizon, now Verizon sucked up MCI.

AT&T’s move on BellSouth is putting pressure on Verizon to acquire someone – possibly Qwest or AllTel.

Sprint is one of the losers here, as AT&T and Verizon expand, Sprint is left with few options. They already picked up Nextel, but there aren’t many other merger or acquisition options for them to follow the same path as AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile doesn’t make much sense, since their all GSM and Sprint and Verizon Wireless are CDMA – if anyone were to suck up T-Mobile it’d be Cingular (also GSM). Not many baby bells left to acquire, and now that the bigger baby bells have each picked up a long distance backbone carrier (SBC with AT&T and Verizon with MCI), they don’t have much need for another – Sprint.

The mergers have been largely driven by falling fortunes. For the longest time telcos were *it*. Growing demand, global networks. But now wireless, VOIP, data services, etc, are the big growth areas. Conventional voice services are declining. And telcos were ill-prepared to compete with cable companies for data services, so it is taking major outlays for new equipment, impacting the bottom line.

Telcos are no longer competing with just other telcos – they have cable and satellite companies to compete with, and increasingly terrestrial wireless broadband services. And the looming threat of data-over-powerline from the electric companies. Where there are data services, there is the capability of providing voice.

TiVo just got in bed with Yahoo!
Yahoo! and SBC (california Telecom) were long ago in bed with each other…
AT&T just bought out SBC.

Two questions arise:
1- Did AT&T keep that alliance with Yahoo! that SBC had?
2- What wireless provider is AT&T married to? If AT&T is not together with Verizon then i’d think there’s room for growth.

via zatsnotfunny.