Its over. Bellsouth is now ATT

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Ryokurin

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Oct 15, 2004
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I personally didn't want this to go through. Partially because I've always hated AT&T, and second because I thought their concessions are bullshit. They got a few more on the table at the end but they are still shitty. For those who care here they are...

- Repatriating 3,000 jobs currently outsourced by Bellsouth (thats fine)

- offering 100% of all living units in ATT/BST Territory broadband with at least 85% delivered by wire. (Bullshit. Bellsouth already offers roughly 85% of their customers DSL lite which is 256k down. What about that other 15%? they either get wimax or dish, and we know how wimax is moving along swiftly)

- Offering naked DSL (dsl without a voice plan) for at least 30 months (Fine, but it should be forever. I don't see myself ever having a land line again)

- Offer new subscribers 768k DSL for $10 a month for 30 months (thats fine)

- Pledging to maintain a neutral network and routing for its wireline broadband internet services (This is a half truth. If you read the entire article it states that they will do it for Internet service, they never said they would for u-verse, their IPTV service which is what ATT wanted companies such as Google and Vonage to pay to use anyways. They physically can't control quality of service like that on their existing network anyways. So basically they said they promised not to charge to use a network they wern't planning on using anyways)

- Giving up right to the 2.5ghz spectrum (who cares. Maybe just maybe this will get them to actually implement wimax.)


Remember this day. The net is about to become like cable tv.
 
It's only down south yo...

Edit: Also ATT Inc. is not ATT Corp. This is essentially SBC + Bellsouth.
 
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I work with Bellsouth a lot. We bought 750 grand of phone equipment from them a few months ago. The support has already gotten worse since they closed down a lot of the sub office. So I can't deal with high end support locally.
 
Ha. I was going to hold off on replying till I heard the true scuttlebutt in the office on Tues, but I guess I will throw in my 2 cents now.

They've already publicly announced 10,000 layoffs due to the BLS, Cingular, ATT "merger" (merger my ass, it's a takeover). Most will be through atttrition (retirements) as they have not told us anything about taking a buyout to leave (we call it "taking the package").

ATT agreed to bring 2,000 jobs back to the US that we (BLS) had outsourced (probably Tier 1 helpdesk jobs for BellSouth.net). That's not a big deal. Most of those jobs are low-paying, high-turnover.

As for the cheap DSL, not a big surprise as ATT has offerred the same deal in their area for a couple of years. And their definition of DSL (256k+) is better than nothing, but nothing anyone on here would buy.

Net Neutrality - now here's a biggie. I'm not sure if they will abide by it, but I am glad to hear it. Company line or not, I am not for anyone flagging some traffic (their users') as "preferential" over others (comcast's) and allowing some websites to pay for once ISP's users to have better speed when viewing the site. Mysterious dropped packets when competetors' packets cross ATT backbones, laggy or dropped VOIP calls when not using ATT's VOIP product, there are lots of dirty tricks a company can play with IP packets. I see where most companies wants to be able to avoid "neutrality" whenever possible, but in this case, it is the best thing for the consumers out there.

As for my job, since I am an IT/Security Architect in the Network space, I am pretty comfortable that I am safe for now. There will be obvious layoffs in commodity areas that overlap with the existing staffing (legal, advertising, PR, payroll, etc), but those areas that have intimate knowledge specific to the BLS company (or network) are probably ok until either the ATT guys learn your area of expertise, or you're determined to be worth keeping.

I don't think my group or job would be moving to San Antonio (ATT HQ) since Atlanta will stay as the HQ of "ATT SouthEast Operations."

Even if I am surprised by a pink slip, I feel pretty confident I can land a decent job in other large companies in this town.

When I get back to the office and they start the "welcome to the ATT family" meetings, I will share anything I can.

Do I think it is a good thing for you guys who have BellSouth telephones/dsl/cingular? In the short term, probably. I know that ATT has big plans for IPTV rolling out in the short term (plans that were longer term for BLS). I think we will see some Cingular sales/revised phone plans to celebrate the merger. DSL prices just dropped a few weeks ago (like $4) but I think they may drop again a little. We've got to stay competative with Cable and we can't do it with speeds at the moment, so we need to beat them on price.

Ok, I've written enough.

TL;DR
 
At least your tech support will be better for your Internet service.

I know, I used to do tech support for Bellsouth and they forced us to not fix the problem but worry about time itself.
 
Our company does alot of work with SBC, which was recently bought out by ATT. Havn't seen any real changes yet in terms of offices or whatever being closed. I'm not to sure SBC has been turning any profits though, so ATT has to change something if they're going to maintain it.
 
Its just something about AT&T I have never trusted. It even goes back to when they started advertising back after the big break up, maybe its the deathstar logo or whatever, but personally I've never trusted them.

Bellsouth was cool with me however. For a small period of time I even considered trying to become a tech for them since I have the electronics requirement needed. (tcom went down hard in 01/02 and I ended up a Turner instead by the time it started to bounce back) I'm just sad to see it go
 
Ryokurin said:
Its just something about AT&T I have never trusted. It even goes back to when they started advertising back after the big break up, maybe its the deathstar logo or whatever, but personally I've never trusted them.

Bellsouth was cool with me however. For a small period of time I even considered trying to become a tech for them since I have the electronics requirement needed. (tcom went down hard in 01/02 and I ended up a Turner instead by the time it started to bounce back) I'm just sad to see it go
Click to expand...

Well if it makes you feel better, it's actually SBC but they decided to use the AT&T name.
 
I know. I actually was starting to warm up to them before they merged, probably because I saw them as slowly dieing out since everything to that point they built up was spun off (Lucent, Cable, NCR, etc) but SBC seems to stand for everything that was bad about AT&T in the 80s and 90s.
 
Ryokurin said:
I know. I actually was starting to warm up to them before they merged, probably because I saw them as slowly dieing out since everything to that point they built up was spun off (Lucent, Cable, NCR, etc) but SBC seems to stand for everything that was bad about AT&T in the 80s and 90s.
Click to expand...

They fucked over NCR. Bought them up, then spit them out a decade later and forcing some of their debt off on them.

Im not bitter... no...
 
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