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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
Telecom: We're just pawns in a big, big game

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2004
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The short, unhappy life of AT&T Wireless appears to be at an end, and the only question is: What does it all mean to wireless customers like you and me?

Singular Cingular phones
Are you an AT&T customer being switched over to Cingular? Or are you an existing Cingular customer with no plans to switch? Here are some of your better phone options.




 




 




 
(Investors are another question entirely: There's a good story in the New York Times  about what a lousy investment the tracking stock for AT&T Wireless turned out to be--if you bought when the stock IPO'd at $29.50 a share. Of course, if you bought at the low--$3.15 in late 2002--then the $15 Cingular's paying is a great deal. Wish I were part of it.)

INSTEAD, I'm just another not-very-thrilled AT&T Wireless customer who once turned down the chance to become a Cingular customer. I think that when service companies like these merge, customers who live in a shared service area--and who presumably had a chance to choose the victor but didn't--should be given the opportunity to bail out with no penalty.

So now I have Sprint PCS and what will become Cingular as my wireless carriers. If Cingular can convince me I'll be happier with them than AT&T made me, I might stay. But this would be the perfect opportunity to make Verizon my second carrier. I've never used Verizon's service, but all my friends say it's their carrier of choice. Still, I haven't been unhappy with Sprint PCS lately, so I may just add another phone (I need two or three total) to that contract. We'll see.

The phone I want to add--the physical device--is Motorola's MPx200, which runs Microsoft's Smartphone OS. The shiny black plastic looks cheap to me, but the phone is really easy to use and has been a good performer. Right now, my demo unit is on AT&T Wireless, so I need to see whether Sprint PCS or Verizon sells this phone. Or maybe I'll buy in when the 2003 operating system comes to devices at a carrier I like.

AS FOR SYNERGY, the best way to describe it is to use a very scientific, Harvard-Business-Schoolish example: the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. That is, synergy can be defined using the candy example and quoting the advertisements, as "two great tastes that taste great together"--a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts sort of thing.

That never worked for AT&T, which is now out of the wireless and cable businesses and God only knows what else because it couldn't deliver what customers expected of the AT&T brand across multiple lines of business. In the process, AT&T managed to fall from near the top of many people's lists of most-admired companies to a company I'd run away from. I used to do lots of business with AT&T, and now I do none.

AT&T isn't the only company to fall into this trap. Synergy sounded a lot better during the heady days of the dot-coms, when even turkeys could fly, than it does today. Maybe the best example of the synergy logic bomb was AOL's acquisition of Time Warner, which everyone at the company now seems to pretend never happened. There are lots of other examples, but the message is clear: If you meet a synergist on the road, kill him. Or at least run the other way.

* * * * *

IN OTHER telecom news, my pal Mike Powell--son of the man who now wishes he hadn't misled us about weapons of mass destruction--thinks the voice-over-IP (VoIP) companies should be free of the regulations that control the wireless telephony industry. This means companies that offer "pure" VoIP service--i.e., computer-to-computer "telephone" calls over the Internet--won't be treated like regular telephone companies.

Powell's rationale for this is that Internet applications--e-mail, for example--have never been treated like traditional telecom services. That logic makes sense to me, though it could lead to something that doesn't: allowing companies that connect the Internet to traditional telephone networks off the hook in the same way.

I'm strongly opposed to exempting anyone from telecom regulations merely because they use the Internet to connect one telephone to another or a computer to a telephone.

We may want to reconsider telecom regulation more generally as the ascent of VoIP continues, but we don't need a sudden change in the marketplace, which a regulatory exemption for VoIP connections to the existing telephone network might provoke.

What do you think? Are you affected by the AT&T purchase? What carrier(s) do you use? Should VoIP be regulated like regular phone service? TalkBack to me below!

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