Ladies and gentlemen, AT&T Wireless (like Elvis) has left the building.
So now what? Is this a new Ma Bell?
Not likely, but I suspect the new and improved Cingular (if the company can integrate AT&T Wireless assets successfully) will put some spark into the landline businesses at parents SBC and BellSouth.
Landline isn’t dead, it just feels like it. SBC and BellSouth have been trying to bundle their local telephony, DSL and wireless businesses for a couple of years now. SBC even introduced a call-forwarding service that takes calls to your wireless phone and forwards them to your wired phone. Plain old telephony one day may be the least interesting part of bundled DSL, satellite TV and wireless services, but it’s a nice part of the bundle if the price is right. Wireless still isn’t built out well enough to replace a corded phone completely.
Speaking of bundles, I wonder how long it will be until Vodafone Group plc and Verizon Communications Inc. unbundle Vodafone’s stake in Verizon Wireless. Some roads, once taken, make it impossible to do a U-turn. Vodafone and Verizon obviously had some very frank discussions leading up to Vodafone’s $38 billion play for AT&T Wireless.
The Verizon-Vodafone union was made somewhat by default, anyway. Bell Atlantic lost its bid for AirTouch to Vodafone, and it was only a matter of time until the two companies linked up. But since then, the two have done very little to integrate their services. Vodafone once announced it wanted to brand all of its services with the Vodafone moniker. Verizon said no.
In June 2001, we ran a story that Verizon said it would consider implementing Wideband CDMA at some point. No one believed it and you sure didn’t hear Verizon talk about W-CDMA in its announcement to spend $1 billion installing EV-DO technology nationwide. Instead, the comments were seen largely as an effort to placate Vodafone. “It’s really a political issue, not a technology issue,” Jane Zweig of The Shosteck Group said at the time. “It doesn’t cost them (Verizon) anything to consider using W-CDMA technology.”
For its part, Verizon has made no secret of its desire to buy out Vodafone’s interest in its wireless business.
However, there may be one common enemy that keeps these two players together: Neither likes to be No. 2.
