The Baby Bells have become bigger than their parent and yes they are converging back. No doubt about it, but the new AT&T is not the old AT&T.
Well, it soon will be under either the same or another name. The whole reason SBC rebranded itself as AT&T after they bought the "old" AT&T was that people didn't know SBC from a hole in the wall but they DID know AT&T. No it's not the same company.
But it's all a part of what WAS the Bell System. Verizon chose to call itself "Verizon" when it bought GTE, not when it bought NYNEX. Then it was still Bell Atlantic. When we bought MCI at a fire-sale price we got UUNET and MCI, but we were not going to call ourselves WorldCom or MCI. Alcatel/Lucent (and Telcordia) are on the table as I see it. I know what happened, my question is why we had to jump through these hoops to get back to where we were in 1984. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
