Tag Archives: at&t

Talks of SBC Acquisition of AT&T

I was a bit taken by surprise this morning to hear on “Marketplace” that SBC is in talks to acquire AT&T for approximately $15 billion. As soon as I arrived in the office I hit the web and poured over the coverage on wsj.com. Since that is a subscription site, take a gander at this article from the New York Times talking about the SBC – AT&T merger talks.

The acquisition of AT&T by one of the RBOCs has been one of those shoes which the American telecommunications industry has been waiting to drop for some time. Those looking at AT&T’s shrinking consumer business and increasingly challenged enterprise business have been expecting an acquisition for some time. The expectation always was that Bell South was going to be the RBOC to make the acquisition, but executives from AT&T and Bell South could never agree on a price. AT&T execs always seemed to be waiting for some sort of appreciation in their stock price or the offer of a premium to close the deal. If the agreed sale price is anywhere in the neighborhood of $15 billion it would seem the executives at AT&T had finally gotten over the notion that the company should earn any sort of premium.

One curious question this raises in my mind is the status of AT&T’s planned virtual mobile network offering. Following the unwind of AT&T Wireless and the subsequent acquisition of that company by Cingular (itself a join venture of SBC and Bell South) has left AT&T without any wireless offering of their own. AT&T had a plan to purchase wholesale wireless network access from Sprint to develop their own enterprise-focused wireless service.

This is far from a certainty, but I can’t help but wonder whether or not the executives at SBC, who have a stake in the success of Cingular, wouldn’t try to apply pressure on AT&T either to lease wholesale network capacity from Cingular or put AT&T’s wireless plans on hold pending completion of the merger. It would be hard to believe that AT&T executives would be happy with such a delay, particularly if a significant element of their strategy then becomes contingent upon the closure of this merger. If I were at AT&T I wouldn’t want to wait. Also, Cingular have not shown that wholesale network sales are a part of their strategy to date.

All those possibilities aside, this merger is most likely a very good turn of events for the telecommunications industry. Finally and slowly some of the excess capacity and outdated competition is subsumed into a new industry order nearly a decade after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and four years after the industry bust.

Consumer groups are likely to voice opposition to the acquisition, though it’s mostly a neutral event for consumers considering the waning role and influence AT&T play. The heritage of the AT&T brand completely overshadows the role the company plays in the industry today. Hopefully one thing consumer groups will be able to do is make the approval of this acquisition contingent upon SBC abandoning their new Voice over IP termination tariffs.

Now the question is when MCI will be acquired by either Verizon or Bell South. That’s the other shoe waiting to drop in the US telecommunications industry.

AT&T Caught With Its Hand in the Cookie Jar

Many months ago I wrote about a surprising charge that showed up on my Verizon phone bill from AT&T. It was a big surprise partly because I was not an AT&T long distance customer. The surprise was made even worse because when I called to ask for a refund on that charge AT&T took an opportunity to first make a series of really obnoxious pitches for me to switch to their service, and then went so far as to lie to me not once, but twice, about my long distance service from Verizon.

It turns out that A LOT of people found similar charges on their bills. 1,267,032 if Dow Jones are to be believed. There were a number of articles that speculated that AT&T made all of these “mistakes” on purpose to circumvent the Do Not Call list, which had just been launched. I don’t know if I give their billing operations that much credit, but conspiracy theories abound.

According to Dow Jones AT&T Corp. (T) will pay $500,000 to the FCC to settle the charges that the company erroneously billed certain AT&T and non-AT&T customers a $3.95 basic rate monthly recurring fee. My two issues with this are that what AT&T charged me was more than $3.95, and others reported similar in the press. Two, AT&T never did refund the erroneous charges on my bill, which I did need to pay because they were on my Verizon bill. AT&T promised a refund and it never came. So Im speculating that even with the size of this fee AT&T likely came away making money from this mistake or scam or whatever you want to call it. Thats just not right.

How Many Bars Do YOU Have?

This morning the Washington Post had this piece on the low-key nature of the AT&T Wireless – Cingular merger. While the piece was a relatively fluffy one (as one comes to expect from the business section of the Post) it did touch on the very interesting issue of branding for the soon-to-be-former AT&T Wireless and their former corporate parent AT&T.

A lot has been going on with these two companies in the last six months or so. AT&T is effectively on the auction block being ready to be bought by Bell South or some other poor bastard, announcing a withdrawal from the consumer market while at the same time putting on an advertising blitz during the Olympics built largely around their consumer VoIP service. And if that, in and of itself were not confusing enough…

AT&T Wireless, which is a completely separate company from AT&T, mind you, had their own advertising blitz during the Olympics. One will recall the “How many bars?” ad with swimmer Michael Phelps. That ad push came on the back of months and months of bad coverage in the press that AT&T claim actually hurt their reputation for having licensed the AT&T Wireless brand to the company AT&T Wireless. Should I just start referring to these companies by their stock ticker symbols (T and AWE) to cut down on the confusion?

It seems Cingular are going to take a slow migration plan with the brand. I actually think this is a mistake. Considering the troubles AT&T Wireless have had I really think this branding exercise should be done like removing a Band-Aid: tear it right off. Cingular should bring in the blokes from Cisco who re-brand the companies their acquire and just completely redo the AT&T Wireless retail locations. They should make a big push to the current AT&T Wireless customers and get all of the service contract plans and features they can into their hands immediately (like roll-over minutes). The new company should use this as an opportunity to tell customers the problems of the past are behind them and engage in some top-notch systems consolidation exercises to truly deliver on that promise.

The perfect storm? Bad Decisions at AT&T Wireless

This posting on Slashdot led me to this article on CIO.com about all of the trouble that happened at AT&T Wireless leading up to their poor experience in the early weeks and months of number portability. It really seems to me to represent an example of a perfect storm of poor executive decision-making.

Amongst the problems at AT&T Wireless that I gathered from the article are:

  • The very poor choice of having meetings regarding the potential for outsourcing and off-shoring in very clear sight of employees who were likely to have their positions eliminated in the process. This seems to have been followed-up by shadowing of those same AT&T Wireless employees by employees from the firm to which the jobs would be outsourced.
  • Some project management choices that sound very unusual to me. While not bein an IT project manager, the decision to have concurrent workstreams all making changes to code at the same time, such that each group was effectively coding against a moving target seems like a very unusual choice.
  • The failure to take into consideration the challenges of the impending wireless number portability and the complications it would create for a new CRM implementation. The sheer volume of customer support calls one could expect at such a point in time should have provided a clarion call that it was probably not the best time to engage in a major IT excercise.
  • Choosing a different firm from all of the other major wireless carriers to manage the number portability. According to the CIO article AT&T Wireless had already signed the contract with NeuStar, but considering the enormity of number portability and the fact that EVERY OTHER major carrier chose a different provider seems to be a senseless choice.
  • It would be easy to be critical of the back office systems that support AT&T Wireless provisioning and billing, but the current management could hardly be blamed for that. These isssues are actually pretty typical of any telecom operation, and are actually the bane of pretty much the entire industry. They certainly don’t make life easy.

The real shame in all of this, I think, is that one set of very poor choices led to some serious problems with what I thought was a great company. I’m still an AT&T Wireless customer, but I’ve had my own problems with them recently. It’s been clear that they’ve offshored their call centre services without adequate training. It’s no wonder the company has been snatched up by Cingular, and I actually suspect that might be the best thing for their customers at this point. Hopefully a new set of executives will be making the IT decisions in the merged company. Hopefully the integration efforts once the merger is closed go better than the CRM implementation. The sooner this merger happens the better for AT&T Wireless so they can stem the churn. Luckily for the happy couple the competition have been making plenty of noise about how delays in the merger are going to be good for their business, helping to make the case for a speedy approval process for the merger.

Is AT&T Thwarting the Do Not Call List?

I’m sure the readers of this blog will remember this rant about AT&T’s crappy customer service last week. Well, evidently there is a new twist in the whole story.

According to this piece on Techdirt there is speculation that AT&T’s billing ruse is actually an effort to thwart the Do Not Call list. I’m not sure how realistic or speculative this piece is, but I thought it was interesting. The AT&T agents certainly had the lies lined up and were on the hard sell sufficiently that I felt this was a blatant effort at manipulation, but knowing what I know about AT&T’s billing systems I have to wonder if they could must the IT wherewithall to actually make such a strategy a reality: target all of your former LD customers with a bogus bill so that they’ll call in and they you can hit them up with a sales pitch.

I wonder what the numbers are on AT&T’s similar billing errors are in the past month. Can all of their former consumer LD customers expect more of the same whenever they need to boost their numbers?

AT&T? Buh-bye!

We subscribe to one of Verizon’s all-you-can-eat local and long distance plans. Withoin a range of a few cents our phone bill is the same every month. I was a bit taken aback when I saw this month’s bill and found it to be about $9.00 more than the standard bill. A quick trip to the on-line bill presention shows that AT&T are trying to charge me $8.73 for long distance. “This is very odd,” I think. Why would I subscribe to AT&T for long distance when I’m paying for an all-you-can-eat plan with Verizon?

So I submit a service ticket to Verizon. About a day later (yesterday) they came back with a message directing me to AT&T customer service, saying that they cannot credit AT&T charges on my bill and I must get the issue sorted with AT&T. Today I finally got my chance to call.

What a group of scammers and liars! The first agent I talk to is clearly offshore. This is actually less of an issue to me so long as agents are sufficiently trained in how to handle customers in the American millieu. Well, she clearly was not. The first thing she tried to do was tell me that I was being charged because the Verizon long distance network was “filled up” when I had made some of my calls, so they had handed them over to AT&T, and that’s why AT&T had sent me a bill. I told her that was nonsense and that if Verizon wasn’t going to disclose that fact I would deal with them but first I wanted to get my credit for $8.73. She said she’d put me over to a billing specialist, but then kept trying to sell my on AT&T’s unlimited plan. “While I’m trying to fix AT&T’s billing error is not a good time to try and sell me on your service. I just want to deal with my current bill,” I told her. She would not drop the subject of having me switch providers. I asked her to drop the subject at least five times. Finally I had to ask to either listen to music while I was on hold or speak to her supervisor. I was getting very angry.

So, after a minute or two on hold I’m dropped into the touch-tone maze. Press “1″ for this, “2″ for that, “*765#2″ to speak to a represenative and all of that garbage. Finally I get through to the billing specialist.

AT&T are blatently lying to me here. They’re telling me Verizon aren’t able to carry long distance calls, so I cannot POSSIBLY have Verizon as my long distance provider and therefor must actually still be an AT&T customer. So I had to open up with my telecom whoop-ass and explain to her Section 271 of the Telecommunciations Act of 1996 and how Verizon received relief under that section of the Act to provide intra-LATA voice services in the Commonwealth of Virginia some time ago (I apologised for not knowing the exact date). She seemed a little taken aback and dumbfounded by this, so finally agreed to look at my account for my change order way back when I cancelled my AT&T long distance. “Oh… oh… THERE it is. November of 2002. I guess we have to give you a credit.”

Jerks. I’m astonished that AT&T would lie so blatantly to somebody as they did here– not once, but twice.