Wireless World: SBC and remaking AT&T

CHICAGO, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- The massive merger of SBC and AT&T may portend momentous changes in the way consumers and businesses procure wireless fidelity and Internet telephone services, among other offerings -- but only if regulators and the U.S. Congress approve the $16 billion proposal.AT&T represents the foundation of the telecommunications industry. Incorporated in 1885 as a subsidiary of American Bell, the company started in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell, it eventually and for a time became the world's largest corporation and the first company to launch a commercial telecommunications satellite, Telstar 1, in 1962.Now tiny compared to its once gigantic size, AT&T's acquisition by SBC -- formerly its subsidiary Southwestern Bell -- could prove quite beneficial for today's telecom consumers, experts told UPI's Wireless World, though it definitely is not what policymakers foresaw a decade ago when they passed landmark telephone-regulation reform."The crafters of the 1996 Telecom Act certainly didn't envision that less than 10 years after the act was signed that the largest long-distance provider would be merging with one of the Baby Bells," said Robert D. Atkinson, director of the technology and new economy project at the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council in Washington, D.C. " By Gene Koprowski