"Telecom titan AT&T Corp launched China's first foreign telecom venture on Friday and gained a window into broadband Internet services in the country, a nascent market that will take time to gather steam."

When the going gets tough, get going! It seems that, in the absence of growth (and presence of actual decline) in domestic telecoms demand, AT&T will move to build a network in China. This seems foolish, given all of the debt, operational, and other problems that BellSouth's Latin American ventures have brought them.

Perhaps they're just looking to get lots of cash from the Chinese government, in order to pay off bondholders in the US, until they can divest themselves of the US wireline voice infrastructure and figure out how to turn a profit in wireless and data. ... Um, that could take a while.