Decius wrote:

AT&T Inc. said Sunday it will acquire smaller rival BellSouth Corp. for $67 billion in stock, in a deal that goes a long way toward resurrecting the old Ma Bell telephone system.

Night of the living dead...

The breakup of ATT in the early 80s didn't necessarily make a lot of sense anyway, in particular, it only created competition in long distance but failed to do anything about the monopoly on the cable plant. Its easy to lay fiber or put up microwave towers to link up COs; its really hard to build out the last mile to everyone's house and whoever owns that wins. At least until wireless came into the picture.

Pretty soon, all across the country, you will be able to get voice, video and data (aka data, data and data) to your house from either of Bell or Comcast or maybe even satellite TV and CDMA/GSM voice and WiMax data. I've long wondered if the the competitive landscape becoming a little more uniform by way of choices between multiple "one stop shop" players could end up being a net win for consumers.

RE: CNN.com - AT&T reaches deal to buy BellSouth - Mar 5, 2006