For all the hand-wringing I and others have done over AT&T, killing the company could be quite easy.
I excised it from my life last week. I took the family to a Sprint store and got us all cellphones. We even moved the old home phone number over.
The fact is that, if you’re not getting Internet broadband service from AT&T, you really don’t need the company. You have several alternatives (three major ones) to Cingular for voice service, and if you can scrounge up Internet connectivity from somewhere you’re done.
AT&T recognized this when it was buying BellSouth. Its predicate for the purchase was that half of Cingular, the cell phone operation, would pay for most of it, along with something it called Interactive TV, essentially a cable service.
AT&T is now going out among the states seeking one-stop franchising for such a service. It’s not proving easy. Even in states like Georgia, which traditionally rolled-over for anything BellSouth wanted, concerns over things like public access are causing legislators to hold back. The company is having to spend money on TV ads to get into the TV business.
Even if AT&T succeeds there, however, it has an uphill fight. Its
copper wires don’t have a fraction of the capacity of cable. Its
central plant isn’t designed to deliver TV. Investments will have to be
made in order to match what cable offers right now, and meanwhile its
cash flow (as in my case) is slowly draining away.
The plan for opponents is simple:
- Highlight the money wasted by low-volume users and get them to switch to mobile.
- Fight AT&T’s efforts to get into cable.
- Use other mobile networks rather than AT&T.
Already AT&T’s co-conspirator, Verizon, is starting to sell off access lines,
stripping its own asset base in order to stay afloat for Wall Street. I
think this will accelerate if AT&T’s share of the access market
goes into freefall.
Send it into freefall.
why are you against a company such as at&t. they want to bring everything to you as a convenience and nothing else. you said you left cingular to go to sprint. good luck. you know they spun off their land line service ‘in order to stay afloat for Wall Street’… and sprint has a partnership with cable companies. why pay more bills. at&t is offering all those solutions at competitive prices. why go on a personal witch hunt to shut down a good thing. do some google searchs for the sprint/nextel merger and see all the little companies sprint gobbled up to make it work. also, look at all the companies you do business with, tv, wireless, cable and internet and see if you don’t find a collation. why would you want to kill one of the most innovated companies in history. look at all the good it has done and the luxuries you enjoy because of it.
My wife and I have been sans-landline for about three years now, and we don’t miss it. We don’t get telemarketers anymore. I would guess they’re afraid of Title 47 of the United States Code, Section 227, which forbids auto-dialing cellular phones. We would have had cellphones anyway, so why a separate line tied to our house and only our house?
When our eldest got old enough to be able to stay home by himself, and old enough to do some extracurriculars on his own, we got him his own cellphone. We have broadband Internet through our cable TV provider, too, so our local phone company gets exactly zero business from us.
Which is fine, because the exorbitant rates they were charging for a single, low-bandwidth piece of copper was ridiculous.
AT&T Inc. is the biggest by M&A. Verizon Communications is by far a superior company from Verizonbusiness to Verizonwireless. Their IP network spans more than AT&T Corp, and their wireless is by far superior since they have been spending billions on upgrades instead of billions on mergers. AT&T Mobility LLC service lacks Verizonwireless by far, looking at the network maps is proof as well as call quality. Dropped calls is false as they stated a leading research company, well the company is a very small firm in SF, CA and they were not authorized to use such study and they were forced to remove it from their commercials. AT&T MObility LLC main consumer complaints is static on the line. Verizonwireless has won wireless carrier of the year 3 years and 2 in a row from wirelessweek.com & #1 in consumer reports. I brought my girlfriend into Verizonwireless (she has AT&T Mobility LLC now) and she was greated by two company representatives “Welcome to Verizonwireless how may we help you today” They were greeters not sales. AT&T Inc. has been muscling ISP’s not allowing them access to their new network, Verizonbusiness quit offering some former MCI services because of that. They quit offering some ISP services in California to providers such as dslextreme.com (gigE) because of AT&T Inc. Initially AT&T Inc. is creating extreme competition but in the long run they will either fail or be broken up again. They are desperate right now in wireless as Verizonwireless has been gaining customers on them even with the iPhone included quarter by quarter since 2004. They are so desperate they paid Apple Inc. R&D for the iPhone, and portion of mothly subscriber fee(s) to Apple Inc. Apple Inc. approached VZW first, and AT&T Mobility LLC last and VZW declined since Apple Inc. wanted many concessions. If you want to see a cool merger Vodafone & Verizon Communications. In the end I think Sprint will spring ahead due to their IP vision & Wireless w/WiMAX.