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Comment by danielrhodes | Hacker News Reader

They weren't wrong. They are one of the biggest cell carriers, backbone, and broadband providers. I'm not sure what role they imagine they would take, but it is similar to the role they have had in the past.

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The AT&T that exists now was not the AT&T that existed when the ads were made. Cingular was a cell phone company that merged with AT&T in the early 00s in order to get their brand name. It is really Cingular that is the modern AT&T. (Yes, I know that they were split into baby-bells and Cingular was at one point also AT&T but at the point in time the commercials were made, AT&T was a distinct company from the Bells that become the conglomerated cell phone/internet providers that exist today in Verizon and AT&T.)

Actually, Verizon is AT&T. My current Verizon account is an AT&T account I activated in ~1994.

Cell phones were a division of AT&Ts overall business and then at some point they spun that out into Verizon. And then later they got back into mobile/cellular via Cingular, essentially competing with their old selves (Verizon).

Verizon was Bell Atlantic (and by buyout NYNEX) and GTE as I recall... So they were already Wireline side of the A/B AMPS system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications

The modern AT&T is really Southwestern Bell/SBC[0], lots of the legacy SBC management is still around even and sbc.com dominates a lot of internal IT infrastructure still.

[0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sbc-to-acquire-att-in-16-b...

Southwestern Bell is really the modern AT&T

Yep. Mashing up the baby bells again started with SW Bell after it became SBC. Then SBC bought up AT&T Corp. Which is now the AT&T we know.

Yes, but most of the backhaul and network stuff was BellSouth, which became Cingular, which acquired AT&T (which had been bought by SBC) and then the head of Cingular (who had been at AT&T before it was split up) purposefully changed the name to AT&T, even tho Cingular was the acquirer.

But all the baby bells were just operating separately in name only in many regards. My mother—in-law worked for AT&T or one of the baby bells her entire career, across multiple states and systems. It was a lot more similar than a lot of people realize. Once wireless became a thing and being regional became much more arbitrary (because a local telephone provider doesn’t matter in the age of nationwide wireless), the re-unification made sense.

And aside from MCI and Sprint, neither of which had good histories, or the German-government propped up T-Mobile (American T-Mobile was largely subsidized by Deutsche Telekom in its early years, first launching nationwide as VoiceStream), no one was able to make a go at competing against the bells anyway. The fact that AT&T and Verizon still dominate the industry and that both used to be the same 40 years ago really isn’t much of a surprise.

I’m generally a fan of deregulation, but the phone situation shows that breaking up the monopolies really didn’t cause any changes, especially when the real change on the horizon was only something very rich companies could invest in.

Cingular was Joint Venture between BellSouth and Southwestern Bell (SBC).

SBC also bought, Pacific Bell, Ameritech and AT&T, when it did, it changes its name to AT&T. Later they bought out BellSouth, and changed its name as well. Cingular grew in phases as they acquired former RBOC's, but once SBC bought out BellSouth, Cingular became AT&T Wireless.

The current corporate entity that calls itself AT&T is formerly SBC.

They did have a late start in the Internet space. Back in the mid-90's, it was Sprint and MCI who ran the major backbone providers. All the regional ISPs I worked with were connected to either Sprint, MCI, or UUNet. Nobody was getting T-1's to AT&T until late 90's.

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