Here are three issues of TELECOM Digest from January 31 and February 1, 2005 which discussed the pending merger of AT&T and SBC (the old Southwestern Bell Telephone Company which had been the 'child' of Ma Bell until the divestiture in the 1980's. It has taken over twenty years to get to the point of reversing the roles that were played in the past of 'parent' AT&T and 'child' Southwestern Bell. SBC had earlier absorbed Ameritech (which was the latest name of Illiois Bell. SBC has been in the process of buying and taking over the old Bell Companies for a few years now, and they also have taken over Cingular Wireless. Its been an exciting quarter-century in telecom! TELECOM Digest Mon, 31 Jan 2005 20:05:00 EST Volume 24 : Issue 47 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson SBC to Acquire AT&T (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) SBC to Buy Former Parent AT&T for $16 Billion (Jack Decker) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:18:03 EST From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: SBC to Acquire AT&T Telecom dailyLead from USTA January 31, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=19065&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * SBC to acquire AT&T BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * MCI seen as acquisition target * Time Warner broadband customers to get free AOL accounts * Microsoft wins telecom business in IPTV * Survey: DSL perceived as inexpensive, but not fast USTA SPOTLIGHT * Order USTA's Best-Selling VoIP Implementation and Planning Guide Today EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Mobile phone video begins to emerge REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * BusinessWeek: Next FCC chief must seek balance Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=19065&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Jack Decker Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:59:44 -0500 Subject: SBC to Buy Former Parent AT&T for $16 Billion Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-sbc-att,1,7058366.story?coll=chi-business-hed SBC to Buy Former Parent AT&T for $16B By JAY JORDEN Associated Press Writer DALLAS -- SBC Communications Inc. has agreed to buy former parent AT&T Corp. for $16 billion, creating one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies and ending the independent run of a company once known as Ma Bell whose roots stretch back to the telephone's invention. The decision followed late-night meetings by directors of SBC, the nation's second-biggest regional phone company, and the 120-year-old icon AT&T, which gave birth to SBC when its monopoly was broken up in 1984. SBC spokesman Larry Solomon said documents in the acquisition were signed early Monday after AT&T's board of directors approved the deal. Board members of SBC approved the transaction on Sunday evening. AT&T shares fell 70 cents, or 3.5 percent, to $19.01 in early trdaing on the New York Stock Exchange, while SBC shares gained 8 cents to $23.70. The acquisition is subject to approvals by shareholders, two federal agencies and at least 26 states, a cumbersome process which prompted the companies to project the deal's completion may take 17 months, an unusually long wait. Full story at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-sbc-att,1,7058366.story?coll=chi-business-hed How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/ ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest Tue, 1 Feb 2005 21:05:00 EST Volume 24 : Issue 49 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson A Thought About the Merger for CLEC's, ISP's, and VoIP (Jack Decker) SBC, AT&T Tout Synergies (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) From: Jack Decker Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:22:51 -0500 Subject: A Thought About the Merger For CLEC's, ISP's, and VoIP I just want to say one thing about the proposed AT&T-SBC merger, just to give those of you who are with CLEC's, ISP's and VoIP providers a little food for thought. Think back to when Time-Warner merged with AOL. As a condition of FCC approval, the new company had to agree to several restrictions, that in essence allowed customers to choose an ISP other than AOL if they so desired. Normally, this would be a condition that could not be imposed on a company by law, but there is no law that says that the FCC must approve every merger, and therefore it has greater "bargaining strength" during a merger than at any other time. Now, let's think about this a moment. Suppose you were the head of the FCC, and you could impose three conditions on SBC and AT&T prior to granting your approval of the merger. What might you ask for? Certainly, some CLEC's might ask that SBC continue to provide UNE-P. Maybe the courts have said that the FCC doesn't have the authority to require a phone company to provide UNE-P, but this situation is a little different, because the FCC can in effect say that unless the voluntarily agree to continue to offer UNE-P, approval will not be forthcoming anytime soon. That would certainly be a rational thing to consider, since many fear that the merger of SBC and AT&T is the start of putting the bad old Bell System back together again. On the other hand, if I were with an ISP, I'd be banding together with other ISP's to ask for non-discriminatory access to SBC customers for the provision of DSL. No more saying that customers on certain types of lines can only have DSL if they buy it from SBC, and no more requirement that a customer have circuit-switched dial tone (from SBC or anybody else) to get DSL service. If SBC wants to be stingy with the lines that the captive ratepayers bought and paid for, and continue to force customers to take dial tone whether they want it or not in order to get broadband service, then maybe they won't mind if their application sits on the back burner at the FCC for years. Then there is the little matter of SBC acquiring AT&T's CallVantage service as part of the merger. If the FCC doesn't include some sort of non-discrimination requirement for non-affiliated VoIP providers, customers of VoicePulse, Vonage, et. al could suddenly find that their VoIP connections go to Hades in a handbasket when using SBC's DSL service, while CallVantage magically works much better. So again, there needs to be some sort of agreement that there will be no playing around with the packets of other VoIP providers. Of course, another solution would be to require the new company to divest CallVantage, but since that was probably one of the things that made the offer attractive to SBC, I doubt they will want to do that. The merger of SBC and AT&T will make a communications behemoth even larger, and ironically, many customers who thought they were all done with SBC when they went to AT&T (or CallVantage) will now find themselves back in the SBC fold, which is exactly where some of them may not wish to be. I don't think it is at all unreasonable for the FCC to put some conditions on this merger. If you agree, and you are a CLEC, ISP, or VoIP provider, please feel free to forward this e-mail to whatever trade organization(s) you might belong to. If no one makes any requests of the FCC, they may just let this merger slide through, while missing a golden opportunity to insure that some semblance of competition remains in the telecommunications industry. How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:32:16 EST From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: SBC, AT&T Tout Synergies Telecom dailyLead from USTA February 1, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=19098&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * SBC, AT&T tout synergies BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Adelphia bids roll in; Time Warner, Comcast offer $17 billion * Wall Street mulls future telecom deals * Skype makes VoIP software available to Mac, Linux users * Time Warner, AOL in Internet marketing deal * Companies take advantage of dark fiber USTA SPOTLIGHT * In USTA's Telecom Bookstore: IP Telephony Principles and Applications EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Verizon Wireless offers network, music clips * Analyst: WiMAX to challenge DSL, cable broadband REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Qwest seeks end to service audits * Ebbers trial spotlights his role in accounting practices Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=19098&l=2017006 TELECOM Digest Wed, 2 Feb 2005 15:56:00 EST Volume 24 : Issue 50 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson AT&T Hangs up - and Few Are Sorry to Say Goodbye (Raju Bhupathiraju) AT&T Inventions Fueled Tech Boom, And Its Own Fall (sufaud) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: RamaChandra Raju Bhupathiraju Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 22:34:54 -0000 Subject: AT&T Hangs Up - and Few Are Sorry to Say Goodbye Tue Feb 1, 6:31 AM ET Op/Ed - USATODAY.com http://story.news.yahoo.com/news? tmpl=story&ncid=742&e=1&u=/usatoday/20050201/cm_usatoday/atampthangsu pandfewaresorrytosaygoodbye AT&T possesses a history that goes back to Alexander Graham Bell, but few people are likely to mourn its demise as an independent company. It was an overbearing monopoly before its breakup, and a largely inept competitor ever since. Not since its early days has it been much of an innovator. AT&T's sale for $16 billion to SBC Communications, announced Monday, is loaded with irony. The company, once so powerful it was known as "Ma Bell," was swallowed by one of the "Baby Bells" spun off in the 1984 breakup. The child was more successful than the parent. Even more telling is the price AT&T went for. In today's world, $16 billion is a pittance. Last week, Procter & Gamble agreed to pay almost four times as much for a medicine chest of sundries known as the Gillette Company. SBC will keep the AT&T brand name, which is well known outside of SBC's region -- indeed, all around the world. For business customers in particular, the AT&T name is still valuable. But the company SBC is buying, subject to approval by regulators, is a shell of its former self. It's no longer dominant, no longer greatly feared by competitors. For much of its history, AT&T was the quintessential monopoly. It had no competition for local service, no competition for long- distance service and offered people few reasons to like it. Its customers could choose whatever color telephone they wanted, the saying went, so long as it was black. Since its breakup, however, AT&T has done little but lose market share to rivals and watch as long-distance prices plummeted. Not that Ma Bell didn't try to compete and reinvent itself. Over the past 20 years, it has been a veritable whirling dervish of acquisitions and spin-offs as it tried to find a niche in the rapidly changing world of telecommunications. It got into the wireless business in 1994 only to bail out last year. It put together the largest cable network, only to sell it to Comcast. At one point, it saw a future in cash registers and bought NCR. In the process of making all of these transactions, the company churned through CEOs. It was always in motion, but never quite arrived. While competitors found ways to thrive in such industries as wireless and cable, AT&T never could. Even NCR prospered once it was let go. In a way, AT&T died long ago and spread its ashes to the winds. Today, bits and pieces of what was once Ma Bell can be found in a dizzying array of concerns, among them SBC, BellSouth, Verizon, Cingular, Comcast, Lucent, Qwest, Agere and Avaya. AT&T was once, arguably, the USA's most powerful company. Soon it will be no more than a division of one of its spin-offs. It's unlikely, though, that anyone but history buffs will really miss it. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra . New articles daily. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, USA Today. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: sufaud Subject: AT&T Inventions Fueled Tech Boom, And Its Own Fall Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 06:15:55 +0000 Missed Calls AT&T Inventions Fueled Tech Boom, And Its Own Fall Bell Labs Invented Transistor, But Couldn't Exploit It; Passing Up a Cell License A Secret On Sale for $25,000 By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL In December 1947, William Shockley and his team of scientists came up with a solution to a problem vexing their employers at AT&T Corp. At the time, voice was amplified over long distances using vacuum tubes. The bulky tubes often overheated and broke down, making long-distance calling expensive. Working at AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., two members of the team, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, came up with a device made from a paper clip, two slivers of gold foil, and a slab of germanium on a crystal plate. The contraption made it easier to transmit sounds with clarity over a long distance. It was later dubbed the transistor. More than any other technology, the invention unleashed the information revolution of the late 20th century. Over time, it also carried the seeds of AT&T's demise. The transistor, and its subsequent improvement and miniaturization on silicon chips, made it possible to store and distribute ever-greater amounts of information. That drove the development of computers, satellites, space exploration and much of modern communications and electronics. Dr. Shockley moved to California and founded a company that played a role in spawning Silicon Valley. The transistor invention won the Bell Labs team the Nobel Prize in 1956. Picture: http://tinyurl.com/457kh Caption: William Shockley The resulting upheaval created new industrial fortunes -- and destroyed others. AT&T was on the casualty list. After its forced breakup in 1984, it was slowly crushed by technologies that drove down the price of a long-distance call, and more recently by wireless calling and Internet phoning. In the past few years its revenue has shrunk steadily, leaving it with valuable long-distance business customers but little else. Once the largest phone company in the world, with a million employees when it was broken up by the federal government 21 years ago, a humbled AT&T agreed Monday to be acquired by one of its offspring, SBC Communications Inc., for $16 billion. The transistor "shows how AT&T invented something that worked to sink it," says David Isenberg, who worked at the company's labs for 12 years until 1998 and is now an independent telecom analyst. Along with the transistor, many of the inventions critical to the telecom upheaval today came at least partly from Bell Labs. They include the Unix computer operating system used in many corporate computer systems; cellular technology, which sparked the rise of wireless calling; and voice-compression technology, which helped make Internet calling possible. But AT&T's monopoly status meant that it rarely exploited its inventions. Constantly threatened with breakup, the company agreed to put its transistor patents in the public domain and submitted to regulations barring it from businesses that didn't involve the telephone. Besides, executives felt little need to seize on the lab achievements since AT&T already enjoyed steady profits from its lock on the phone business. "When I run into old Bell Labs people the first thing they say is, 'Can you believe what has happened?' " says Robert Lucky, a scientist and executive who worked at Bell Labs for 31 years until 1992. Even at the time of the breakup in 1984, he says, "the feeling was that we had a network that was the envy of the world. No one could duplicate it." Instead, says Dr. Lucky, "what you had was big, new industries taking Bell Labs technology and turning it into lots of revenue." The growth of Internet phoning was the "final nail in AT&T's coffin," says Mr. Isenberg. The technology allows users to make calls through their high-speed Internet connections independent of the phone company. Some companies offer software to do this free. The inventor behind one of them, a Swede named Bastiaan Kleijn, is a former scientist at Bell Labs. Other companies charge a monthly fee for unlimited calls. In the year before its sale to SBC, AT&T embraced Internet calling. But as the technology takes hold, it is unlikely companies will be able to charge much for it. "AT&T started the electronics revolution that in the end devoured it," says Eli Noam, the director of the Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia University. The revolution began with Dr. Shockley and some silicon. During World War II British and American scientists had discovered signs that silicon could detect high-frequency radar signals, according to a PBS program and Web site on the history of the transistor, called "Transistorized." Silicon is a type of semiconductor -- a substance that conducts only small amounts of electricity. Dr. Shockley made some headway designing a semiconducting device to improve long-distance voice transmission, but ran into problems and handed his work to two members of his team, Dr. Brattain, a physicist with a knack for building things in a lab, and Dr. Bardeen, an accomplished theoretical thinker. Shortly before Christmas 1947, the two made the breakthroughs that led to the creation of the transistor. Immediately aware of the significance of their discovery, Dr. Shockley was happy, but also outraged that he had not been included in their important work. He subsequently built his own, sturdier version of the transistor within a month and insisted that only his name should go on the patent. The other two scientists were shocked. "He called both Bardeen and I in, shortly after the demonstration, and told us that sometimes the people who do the work don't get the credit for it," recalled Dr. Brattain in an interview recorded in 1974 and preserved on the Web site. Drs. Brattain and Bardeen ultimately kept Dr. Shockley's name off the first transistor patent although his name was on later patents. Chart: http://tinyurl.com/5n9lr Caption: Long Distance: Some key dates in AT&T history Drs. Brattain and Bardeen later became university professors. In 1956, Dr. Shockley moved to California where he started his own company, called Shockley Semiconductor, located near Stanford University. Just a year later, exasperated with Dr. Shockey's difficult personality, eight of the original scientists at the company left to start their own company called Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. Veterans of Fairchild went on to form other powerhouse chip makers including Intel Corp., bringing to prominence the industry that gave Silicon Valley its name. (Dr. Shockley's reputation was later tarnished by his theories on intelligence and race. He died in 1989.) Normally a company would seek to squeeze maximum licensing fees from a breakthrough patent. But AT&T was motivated to share its transistor technology. The U.S. government had filed an antitrust lawsuit in 1949, seeking to break up the company. "If AT&T sat on the patents it would give the Justice Department one more reason to break it up," says Michael Riordan, co-author of a book on the history of the transistor, called "Crystal Fire." The company had repeatedly argued that its monopoly -- and the innovation its labs nourished -- was for the public good. Bell Labs agreed to share its knowledge on how to build a transistor with any interested party for just $25,000. Dozens of companies, including International Business Machines Corp., General Electric Co. and Texas Instruments Inc. paid the fee, according to Mr. Riordan. Another buyer was a Japanese tape-recorder maker called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. It developed a transistor radio along with other consumer electronics and soon found a name Americans could pronounce: Sony. In 1956, AT&T signed a consent decree with the federal government that allowed it to keep its structure under which it sold both phone service and telephones themselves. In exchange, AT&T promised to stay out of other businesses and license its patents freely. AT&T's equipment arm, Western Electric, had to withdraw from selling sound equipment for film producers and movie theaters -- giving up experience in a competitive market that would have proved useful later. The decree also put the transistor patents in the public domain. As a result, while AT&T used transistors to improve the reliability and quality of the phone calls it relayed, it played little role in developing the integrated circuit. That fame and fortune went largely to Texas Instruments and Fairchild, which independently figured out a way in the late 1950s to fabricate and embed multiple, miniaturized transistors on a tiny silicon chip. Those advances led to the birth of the microprocessor, the engine of personal computers. Keeping AT&T from selling to customers other than itself made it wholly unprepared for the day, in 1984, when it was no longer a monopoly and became free to compete like any other company. "There was never any sense of urgency in the company because competition was absent," says Greg Blonder, an engineer and executive at the labs for 17 years until 1999 and now a venture capitalist. "Whereas everyone else in the world saw the new technologies as an opportunity to upend the market, AT&T saw no reason to do this." Cellphones were a major area where AT&T squandered a technology lead, and it wasn't because of government restrictions. Bell Labs scientists conceived of the cellular concept -- the idea that a phone call could be moved from one tower to another as the caller moved -- as early as 1947. Along with Motorola Inc., Bell Labs scientists helped make mobile telephones a commercially viable proposition in the 1970s. In 1983 the Federal Communications Commission set guidelines for the rollout of cellphone service. An incumbent carrier would get one license in each market while the second would be up for grabs. At the time, AT&T was about to be split up, and it could have demanded that the new AT&T long-distance company be given the incumbent licenses. But Charles Brown, then chief executive, decided that the cellphone was largely a local business. "He felt that it was logical that the cellular business should go to the Baby Bells," says Sheldon Hochheiser, AT&T's former historian, referring to the local phone companies spun off in the 1984 breakup. A study at the time by McKinsey & Co. predicted that by the year 2000 there would be 900,000 cellphone users in the U.S. Many thought the prediction was way too high. The actual number was more than 100-fold greater than the prediction. The licenses that Mr. Brown had decided not to seek turned out to be worth many billions of dollars. Eventually AT&T realized it had missed the boat on cellphones. It bought a cellphone provider in 1993 but later spun it off as an independent company called AT&T Wireless. That company was acquired last year by Cingular Wireless, which is 60%-owned by SBC, and the AT&T Wireless name was retired. AT&T was also well-positioned to become a powerhouse in computers at the time of its breakup. Some envisioned it as a competitor to IBM. "It turns out that knowing a lot about computers was different than selling them," says Mr. Hochheiser. AT&T was used to designing computers for itself, not outside customers. To jump-start the business, in 1991 AT&T bought computer maker NCR Corp. in a hostile deal worth $7.4 billion. The deal flopped and NCR was spun off five years later. Inside AT&T, some played down the failure to seize new markets, believing that new technology was driving growth in the company's core business. The fax machine, for example, was another innovation Bell Labs helped develop that ended up being manufactured and sold elsewhere. "AT&T as an equipment maker missed the fax machine," says John Zeglis, the former chief executive of AT&T Wireless who also served earlier as AT&T's president and general counsel. "But wow, did long-distance minutes boom. The theory was, give away the technology so it creates more usage for the communications path." Now as AT&T finally prepares to vanish as an independent company, it leaves a vacuum in innovation and research that will be hard to fill. AT&T could afford to embark on long-run research because, as a telephone monopoly, it was the only phone company that would benefit. But in today's world of cutthroat competition, few companies can afford such an approach. (Lucent Technologies Inc. owns the bulk of the old Bell Labs, which focuses on developments with more immediate uses for Lucent.) "Yes, phone calls were very expensive and we got rid of a monopoly," says Mr. Riordan, the co-author of the transistor history. "But this was a company that literally dumped technology on our country. I don't think we'll see an organization with that kind of record ever again." URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110729925236542968,00.html NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra . New articles daily.^^ *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml PAT