Previously, on “The Telecom Industry Tries To Confuse Us”:

• The old Bell System (which had the corporate name AT&T, although few of us knew it as that) was broken up by the court system into component parts. The mothership, AT&T, sold long distance, while the regional phone companies created by the breakup included SBC and BellSouth.
• When cellular telephones came on the scene, AT&T formed AT&T Wireless. SBC and BellSouth started their own cellular telephone companies but eventually merged them into one company, Cingular Wireless, which was owned 60 percent by SBC and 40 percent by BellSouth.
• For business reasons, AT&T eventually spun AT&T Wireless off into a separate company. Both used the AT&T name and logo, but they were separate.
• A few years ago, I switched my cellular service to AT&T Wireless. Then, AT&T Wireless (not the old parent company, just the cellular spinoff) was bought by Cingular. So, now, I am a customer of Cingular Wireless.
• The parent company AT&T’s fortunes declined; with the rise of cellular telephones and voice-over-Internet, the long distance business isn’t as important as it seemed back during the Bell System breakup. So AT&T (the parent company) was bought by SBC. But, even though SBC was the bigger fish, AT&T is too much of a household word to throw away. SBC adopted the name of the company it was acquiring and became AT&T.

Confused yet? Well, today,
AT&T (formerly SBC) announced that it’s going to buy BellSouth. In addition to BellSouth’s land-line business, the sale will give AT&T 100 percent control of Cingular. According to the AP story, the BellSouth and Cingular names will likely be retired and I will once again be a customer of … you guessed it … AT&T.