AT&T, Cingular, and Colbert

Boyum pointed me to this video, which gives a mostly-complete overview of what happened.

What's up with AT&T?

Or is it at&t now? Assuming nobody puts a stop to it, AT&T is buying out BellSouth. For those not paying attention, that means that of the 7 Bells resulting from the original AT&T split, 4 of them are back under the long distance company, and Verizon has the rest except for Qwest having the old USWest. I guess 3 is better than 1 at least, although the bundling the local lines with other things is worse in my opinion than covering larger areas.

Of course that also means that BellSouth won't be complaining about dropping the Cingular name anymore either. Back in November when SBC bought AT&T and changed their name, they said they'd change from Cingular back to AT&T as a brand. Of course with their campaign to move to Cingular and claiming it's better, everyone wondered how long it'd be before they actually tried it. Of course BellSouth owned 40% and was pissed but couldn't do much about it. Now that's out of the picture, but everyone still seems to agree it's a bad idea (last part of article).

It'll be interesting to see what all this happening does to the customer bases. It seems a lot of Cingular customers had no clue that the company eventually plans to change the name again. They're also still losing ground on customers. Add on top of that the new warnings about off network use and in at least one case I know telling people they have a month to switch to another company because the account is costing them too much. Then the big northeast outage tonight... Hopefully that's not going back to their old pre-merger history of not being able to keep the network running. I've been saying for a while that Cingular needs to really improve, primarily to become a competitor with Verizon on something other than cost. Once that happens both companies should improve for customers. Hopefully that'll happen sooner than later, although all this buying companies can't be good for the cash they could be dumping into network upgrades.