The two largest telecommunication company, AT&T, announced today that it is going to buy Bell South, the second largest telecommunications company for $65Billion. AT&T will also own Bell South's Cellular phone service, Cingular. http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181500965 Since there will now be just one old fashioned telephone company, will this mean higher bills? Maybe, and maybe not. The reason for this buyout is because of the increasing amount of people switching to digital phone lines, such as Vonage and Time Warner's Road Runner phone service; the increasing amount of people getting broad band internet; and Cable TV. The merger will have to be approved by the shareholders, first, as well as other regalutory authorities. The merger was going to happen sooner or later because of more people switching to digital phone lines over the old fashioned kind, simply for cheaper prices. I just think it is too early for it and if it does get approved, it really won't benefit the consumer, this means prices for digital phone service will go up to around where old-fashioned telephone service is at right now, so there will be competition, but not fair competition. Oh and MA Bell is what the company was called before 1984 before the government forced them to split up so that they wouldn't become a big monopoly because in the 1980s, that is when the telecommunications technology advanced. And now it seems that they will be back together again...
Yeah, AT&T was forced to break up back in the day, looks like they're trying to get the monopoly back again. Then again, if we're talking monopoly we need to look at verizon. They own everything.
