Get ready to bend over, AT&T eyeing Bellsouth for $65 billion |
Hold onto your phones, this may soon be a two horse race between AT&T and Verizon. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required, New York Times no subscription version here) is reporting that AT&T is in talks to buy Bellsouth for $65 billion. Might be announced as early as Monday and would make them the biggest communications company in the US, “possibly the world” according to Cynthia Brumfield.
Mark Evans points out the historical ironies:
It was only 22 years ago, that the old AT&T was split into seven “Baby Bells” in wake of the Department of Justice’s anti-trust suit. You can’t help but ask what he AT&T break-up exercise was really all about now that Humpty Dumpty has been put back together again.
Om Malik conjurs the Delorean and Marty McFly:
So its pretty much back to the future. I think this could prompt another round of mergers. Qwest and Sprint Local could make good partners. Of course, Verizon could make some moves of its own, and snap-up someone like Alltel.
Man oh man oh man, this merger talk stuff is usually not very good for consumers. Less choices, more them getting in bed with the government, more us reaching for the soap. The bigger they get, the less they tend to care about individual customers. Middle class erosion continues.
Dwight Silverman: “Joy. Soon we’ll all be leasing our phones again and paying outrageous prices for long-distance calls.”
I’d like more competition in the utilities/telephone space, not less. Next target: broadband internet? We were just talking about this on Friday and if this deal actually comes to fruition, I’m moving up the reality percentage from 5% to 10% on them screwing with broadband internet pricing, customers be damned.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Verizon should buy alltel. I live less than a Mile from the Westmoreland-Allegeny county line (near Pittsburgh, PA, USA). Allegeney = Fios. Westmoreland = No Fios. All because Alltel refuses to share their telephone poles (because the ground is filled with rocks and clay) with Verizon.
Of course, this could bring about the dreaded monopoly. If Bandwidth is $500/mbit/s, I will urge geeks of the nation to build their own backbones, setup a bridge into their neighbor’s open WiFi, Connect everything to everybody and just dump the traditional ‘net as we know it.
Rules:
Hack and be hacked.
DDoS and be DDoSed.
Write a virus and may god be with you if someone finds out.
TCP/IPv6 Only
Before you sell your chunk of the “new ‘net” to a company, be sure to tell them that they’ll be disconnected when anyone finds out.
Seed the Torrent to at least 100%.
Community Effort: Mod Asterisk to act like a distributed phone network.
Community Effort: Mod bittorrent to supprt live streams
Bridge not to the “old” web
Comment by JimXugle — March 5, 2006 @ 9:34 pm PST