Thread: AT&T To Cut 10,000 Jobs After BellSouth Merger

Actually they are cutting even more jobs from another merger. I also have a feeling to get ready for some price increases in the future.


http://www.10news.com

AT&T To Cut 10,000 Jobs After BellSouth Merger
Consumer Advocates Worry Consumers Will Have Fewer Choices

POSTED: 8:07 am PST March 6, 2006
UPDATED: 8:51 am PST March 6, 2006

ATLANTA -- AT&T plans to cut an additional 10,000 -- mostly through attrition -- as a result of its merger with BellSouth.

Chief Financial Officer Rick Lindner told a conference call on Monday that the cuts will occur in 2007 through 2009.

The reductions come on top of the phone company's estimate of 13,000 cuts from its merger with SBC Communications, and another 13,000 from operational initiatives.

AT&T announced on Sunday that it has agreed to buy BellSouth in an all-stock transaction worth $67 billion.

AT&T said it expects to save $2 billion a year through the merger, which goes a long way toward putting back together the old Ma Bell system. It was broken up more than two decades ago.

Even so, Consumer Federation director of research Mark Cooper said there's no chance that the deal will be held up on antitrust grounds.

If the merger goes go forward, it would have 70 million local-line customers, as well as 54 million wireless subscribers. In addition, there are nearly 10 million broadband customers.

The deal would substantially expand the reach of AT&T, already the country's largest telecommunications company by the number of customers served. BellSouth is the dominant local telephone provider in the Southeast.

The purchase of BellSouth would give AT&T total control of Cingular, the nation's largest cell phone provider, and BellSouth's nine-state network. Together, the three companies employ more than 316,000 people.

One analyst said that, given the interest among cable firms vying for traditional phone companies' share of local telephone service, there may be more telecom mergers ahead.

OK, let's get this straight.

AT&T isn't AT&T - It's Southwestern Bell (SBC Com) Southwestern Bell recently bought out AT&T, but elected to change the name to AT&T.

They love India with a fierce passion. Article says they're firing 13,000 employees. A big chunk reduces duplication, but watch for a very big piece of the spoils to go to Bangalore, India. Watch for follow-on mass layoffs in favor of India. The 13,000 figure is just a warm-up.

The WashTech website (Communications Workers of America) http://www.washtech.org/
is probably where the job destruction will be tracked from.

All you readers in Alabama, Georgia and Bell South territory, watch for your phone service to suck. Just hope to hell you never ever have a billing problem with them - 'cause if you do, you're gonna have to deal with Bangalore, India and you are guaranteed to lose.

If the article is correct there are 36,000 jobs getting cut. !0,000 from the Bellsouth merger, 13,000 from the SBC deal, and an additional 13,000 jobs.

I have SBC DSL and India is already handling tech calls. When I first got DSL their tech support was excellent with American workers taking the calls. The India support on the other hand is totally useless and will hang up on you when they can't help. The last time I dealt with them they got my computer so fouled up I had to spend half the day undoing the mess.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 76,00.html

Times March 07, 2006


Hasta la vista, baby – but does telephone merger sound the death knell for internet rivals?
American view by Gerard Baker

IN THE magnificent Terminator film series, disgracefully overlooked again and again for the major gongs by Oscar voters, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a robot that, no matter how much damage he suffers, is able to put himself back together again.

In one film a Terminator robot is actually exploded into thousands of little pieces — but just when you think it is really over, the bits begin to melt into blobs, then coagulate and reform themselves into a creature as powerful and even more terrifying than before.

There’s something eerily reminiscent of the Terminator about the American telephone market. With the announcement at the weekend of an agreed merger between AT&T and BellSouth, the US telecommunications sector is starting to look like one of those battered and broken but apparently indestructible cyborgs.

In 1984 (coincidentally the year The Terminator was released) the US Government broke up America’s telecoms giant. American Telephone and Telegraph, the once venerable progeny of Alexander Graham Bell, had come to be seen as a model of the inefficiencies and anti-competitive instincts of a vast monopoly. After a long-running lawsuit, the courts eventually ruled that the monopoly should be broken and the disaggregation began.

The break-up of Ma Bell, as it was once affectionately known, produced seven regional telephone companies — Baby Bells, they were called inevitably — and reduced the once-mighty AT&T to the status of solely a long-distance service provider. It even lost that monopoly after a few years when MCI and Sprint came on the scene. The Baby Bells enjoyed regional phone service monopolies but would have to compete for capital with each other and with AT&T, and would be subject to strict regulatory controls.

This disaggregated model of telephone operation lasted less than a cyber-minute. After deregulation in the mid-1990s, the Bells began to remerge and reform themselves into creatures with terrifyingly futuristic names such as Verizon and Qwest. Only a few months ago the consolidation advanced further when AT&T was acquired by SBC (a former Baby Bell that covered the American South West) and the merged company took the AT&T name. Now that new company is already planning to swallow BellSouth, leaving only three regional ex-Bells to carve up US territory between them — ATT/Bell South, SBC and Verizon.

(If approved, this deal will leave the wonderfully anachronistic Cincinnati Bell — founded in 1873, predating even AT&T, and operating a local phone service outside Ma Bell’s monopoly — as the last independent company and the only one still to carry the Bell name.)

This latest merger is raising angry calls from consumers’ groups and some politicians who see it as the death knell for the Bells. They want the US Government finally to step in and call a halt to the recreation of a telephone monopoly.

Edward Markey, the leading Democrat on the House of Representatives committee that deals with telecommunications and the internet, told The Wall Street Journal that the deal represented “a mother and child reunion”. He said that Congress should “thoroughly review the proposal to assess its impact on consumers and competition”.

The recreation of the old Bell monopoly has proceeded largely without interference until now. In part this reflects the radically changed nature of the industry since AT&T’s break-up 22 years ago. The explosion of competition from wireless, cable satellite and other communications providers has clearly helped to reduce prices for consumers, despite the mergers of the phone companies. But the tolerance also reflects a hands-off regulatory approach. The Clinton Administration fretted publicly about re-aggregation, but did nothing to stop it. The Bush Administration, with a more laissez faire approach, has taken a broadly positive view of mergers, rarely entering the fray to stop them.

Yet this latest marriage is likely to provoke much more hostility — and perhaps even scrutiny — than any of the others. AT&T and BellSouth will certainly make a strong case that their merger will help to promote more of the advantages of “convergence” in the technology/telecommunications field. But their angry opponents will include not only whiny consumer groups and politicians on the make but the potentially more powerful cable and internet companies.

Their big concern is that the giant new phone companies are steadily creating a stranglehold on that supposedly most democratic and market-nurturing of entities, the internet.

AT&T and BellSouth have been among the most vigorous proponents of what in effect is a two-tier web. As their investment makes available faster internet speeds for consumers so that television and movie-quality moving pictures and sound will be widely available, they want to charge different rates for the different services. In particular, they aim to transmit their own high-speed, high-quality internet services to customers for an additional fee, while those of rivals will be offered at slower speeds.

The idea has provoked fury among media and technology companies such as Yahoo! Google, Microsoft and Time Warner, who fear that they will either have to pay additional fees to the phone companies to gain access to customers using the faster-speed internet or settle for lower-quality service.

A few years ago telephone companies looked frightfully old-fashioned. Technological dinosaurs lumbered with ancient networks and high costs, they could only look on as younger and more nimble internet and software rivals wrapped them in a web that seemed set to destroy their decaying power.

Who’d have thought, as the 21st century advances at an ever-accelerating pace, that a big, powerful, expanding company called AT&T would be seizing control of it?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11701143/

How the AT&T deal could affect various services
BellSouth acquisition comes at complicated time in telecom industry

The Associated Press
Updated: 3:51 p.m. ET March 6, 2006


AT&T Inc.’s planned acquisition of BellSouth Corp. comes at a complex time in telecommunications. The traditional telephone business is under assualt by cellular and Internet-based calling, and the distinction between local and long-distance phone service is fading. In response, phone companies are investing heavily to start selling subscription TV and bolster their wireless and Internet services.

A summary of what the AT&T-BellSouth deal could mean in some key product areas:

Local phone service
The rationale for SBC Communications Inc.’s acquisition of AT&T last year also is in play here for BellSouth: Carriers can offer more compelling packages by linking local and long-distance services. Overall, AT&T and BellSouth could save on some costs by eliminating redundant operations. But since their local service territories don’t overlap, the deal likely would have little impact on phone bills — unless state regulators try to condition their approval for the merger on holding down rates for basic phone service.

Cell phones
AT&T and BellSouth jointly own Cingular Wireless, the nation’s No. 1 carrier in terms of subscribers. Now AT&T could return its brand to the scene while making it easier to offer bundles of wireline and wireless services. Cingular had acquired AT&T Wireless in 2004.

Internet
The deal would make AT&T the nation’s largest broadband provider, surpassing cable-modem leader Comcast Corp. by more than 1 million lines. AT&T also operates a key Internet data backbone, raising questions about whether AT&T can manipulate traditionally neutral data flows to its advantage.


Subscription TV
Cable TV providers have had success offering phone service, but phone carriers are behind in turning the tables and offering subscription TV. To differentiate their video service with multimedia, interactive features, the phone carriers are laying new fiber-optic cable. Now AT&T could take advantage of extensive fiber that BellSouth has deployed in new housing developments where old copper phone wires didn’t have to be torn out. Once TV service is ready to be widely offered, a heftier AT&T might have an easier time cutting deals to buy programming than it and BellSouth would have faced on their own.

I have SBC DSL

I have it too. And I've been looking for a different server ever since I heard that news.

It looks like ALL jobs are being filled in India. Their middle-class is growing and ours is disappearing. I wonder why?