Bell Telephone Company

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. Cingular (a independant company owned by SBC and BellSouth) bought AT&T Wireless, which at that point in time was an independent company spun off from AT&T (the long distance company left over by the Ma Bell breakup,) months before, and lost the right to use the AT&T name, which required spending millions on new signage and untold gallons of orange paint rebranding hundreds of AT&T stores as Cingular stores. Then SBC bought AT&T (the long distance company,) and started renaming themselves AT&T, and of course getting the right to use the AT&T name for wireless, but BellSouth wasn't interested in putting another company's name on their half of Cingular, until... ...AT&T (SBC) merged with BellSouth and became one happy dysfunctional company, and started spending untold millions rebranding the Cingular stores as AT&T stores...

A. How did PacTel get stuck at 1900- MHz? Generally the incumbent landline Telco got the 800-Mhz "B" (which originally stood for "B"ell, as in Ma Bell!) license unless they were shortsighted enoughbto sell it to someone else in case this whole cellphone thing turned out to be a fad! ;-) (US West, now Qwest, sold most of their original licenses so here in Denver, Verizon is the B carrier, and AT&T is the "A" or "A"lternate carrier. Or perhaps he assumes the original "B" carrier there, who must have bought the license from PacTel originally, was somehow affiliated with them, since PacTel effectively sold themselves out of the cellphone biz until the 1900MHz PCS-band auctions years later allowed them back in. (As it did Qwest in Colorado and a large part of the midwest.) (You've got to love the government- they broke The Phone Company into a dozen regional companies to protect consumers from "monopoly" and then let all of them merge back into two or three to benefit consumers by the "economies of scale!") My recollection from that time frame is that Cingular was merely a rebranded name for the cellular service which SBC implemented shortly after the SBC/Bell South merger. They may have been considered independent (much in the same way VZW is technically independent from Verizon...but in reality it was the same company with the same board members. ATTWS existed long before SBC bought AT&T. I know, because from about 1994-1999 (or perhaps 1998) I and the company (Wired Magazine) I managed IT and landline/wireless service for used the A-side carrier Cellular One (SF Bay Area market). AT&T incorporated C1 and rebranded as ATTWS. During that time, I also had accounts with Pac Bell Wireless, Nextel, and GTE Wireless (Wired wanting me to stay on top of who had the best coverage). I'm aware of the logistical hassles incurred after the by all the sign changes, but the company was known as Cingular before it became ATTWS. Because, at least in the SF Bay Area, C1 (which ATTWS later acquired) was already using the 800 MHz TDMA and GTE Wireless was using the 800 MHz CDMA freqs. That's why I get my landline telephone and Internet access from the cable company, and my wireless phone service from a company that doesn't do US landlines. US telcos suck ass; they're monolithic monsters that employ large numbers of obnoxious bureaucratic jerkoffs. :)

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