FCC Green-Lights AT&T-BellSouth Merger
With little time to spare in the current year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved the merger of AT&T and BellSouth. This clears the way for the creation of a US$5.8 billion directory publishing entity, which will cover much of the United States and control YellowPages.com under a single roof, rather than the joint venture structure operating today.
We will have more coverage of this merger after the new year. In the meantime, Happy New Year to all.
It’s also interesting to note that this will bring AT&T more marketing heft and economies of scale to push out its IPTV offering. Panning back, this will enable better positioning for bundled services (voice, video, data & wireless) which not only has customer service, billing and retention benefits but also will position AT&T (and others in the quad-play race) to distribute content and advertising in a "continutity of services" package across all of the connected devices where these services will reside.
Comment by Mike — January 2, 2007 @ 12:00 am
More on this from Reuters
Comment by Tim — January 3, 2007 @ 12:00 am