AT&T Looks To Cable For Help Pushing VoIP

from the yes,-but... dept

AT&T has been a bit confused lately about what they really want to do. They bought a mobile phone company... and then spun it off. They bought a cable company... and then sold it off. They offered residential long distance... and then they stopped. It seems that there's no long-term planning going on there these days. Lately, they've been focused on their new VoIP offering (who would have thought that AT&T's big play is to be another Vonage?), and to help push it, they're going to partner with the cable broadband providers as a channel. That is, any time someone comes to AT&T without broadband and wants VoIP phone service, AT&T will point them to one of their cable partners. Of course, those cable partners are all working on their own VoIP offering, so what's the benefit in getting service from AT&T? In fact, with cable companies beginning to realize that they should just give away VoIP to reduce churn and better compete with the telcos, there's no reason to go with AT&T at all. Oh well. Given AT&T's recent history, maybe they're just looking to sell off the CallVantage service anyway.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 19 Aug 2004 @ 12:49pm

    Never ATT again

    As someone who has been bitten by ATT's churn... Both with ATT cell to ATT Wireless as a separate company to Cingular. And then ATT broadband bought by Comcast where I saw a 33% increase in monthly service fees a few weeks after the taking over with a DECREASE in service level (bandwidth throttling, lousy customer support, pay the bill in advance, etc.) I don't feel that anything ATT is going to be stable enough for me to want to do business with them. What a bunch of losers.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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