History AT&T

Early International Activity 

The history of AT&T is in large measure the history of the telephone in the United States. AT&T's roots stretch back to 1875, with founder Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone. During the 19th century, AT&T became the parent company of the Bell System, the American telephone monopoly. The Bell System provided what was by all accounts the best telephone service in the world. The system broke up into eight companies in 1984 by agreement between AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice. From 1984 until 1996 AT&T was an integrated telecommunications services and equipment company, succeeding in a newly competitive environment. Today, AT&T is a global networking leader, focused on delivering IP-based solutions to enterprise and government customers. Additionally, as AT&T pivots away from traditional consumer services, the company continues to offer consumers and small businesses a breakthrough alternative to traditional services – Voice over IP.

The AT&T Corp., formerly known as the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, is as old as the telephone itself.

The company that became AT&T began in 1875, in an arrangement among inventor Alexander Graham Bell and the two men, Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, who agreed to finance his work. Bell was trying to invent a talking telegraph -- a telephone. He succeeded, earning patents in 1876 and 1877. In 1877, the three men formed the Bell Telephone Company to exploit the invention. The first telephone exchange, operating under license from Bell Telephone, opened in New Haven, CT in 1878. Within three years, telephone exchanges existed in most major cities and towns in the United States, operating under licenses from what was now the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1882, American Bell acquired a controlling interest in the Western Electric Company, which became its manufacturing unit. Gradually, American Bell came to own most of its licensees. Collectively the enterprise became known as the Bell System.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporated on March 3, 1885 as a wholly owned subsidiary of American Bell, chartered to build and operate the original long distance telephone network. Building out from New York, AT&T reached its initial goal of Chicago in 1892, and then San Francisco in 1915. On December 30, 1899, AT&T acquired the assets of American Bell, and became the parent company of the Bell System. Because signals weaken as they travel down telephone wires, building a national network required several inventions. Loading coils, invented independently at AT&T and elsewhere (1899), allowed the network to be built out to Denver. The first practical electrical amplifiers, devised at AT&T (1913) made transcontinental telephony possible.

Until Bell's second patent expired in 1894, only Bell Telephone and its licensees could legally operate telephone systems in the United States. Between 1894 and 1904, over six thousand independent telephone companies went into business in the United States, and the number of telephones boomed from 285,000 to 3,317,000. Many previously unwired areas got their first telephone service, and many others got competing companies. But the multiplicity of telephone companies produced a new set of problems -- there was no interconnection, subscribers to different telephone companies could not call each other. This situation only began to be resolved after 1913.

In the early 1900s, AT&T engaged in businesses that ranged well beyond the national telephone system. Through the Western Electric Company, its manufacturing subsidiary, AT&T affiliated and allied companies around the world manufactured equipment to meet the needs of the world's telephone companies. These firms also sold equipment imported from the United States. By 1914, International Western Electric Company locations included Antwerp, London, Berlin, Milan, Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Tokyo, Montreal, Buenos Aires, and Sydney.

In 1925, Walter Gifford, newly elevated to the presidency of AT&T, decided that AT&T and the Bell System should concentrate on its stated goal of universal telephone service in the United States. He therefore sold the International Western Electric Company to the newly formed International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) for $33 million in 1925, retaining only AT&T's interests in Canada. Although AT&T retreated from international manufacture, it retained an international presence through its drive to provide global telephone service to customers in the U.S.

In 1927, AT&T inaugurated commercial transatlantic telephone service to London using two-way radio. Initially, these calls cost seventy-five dollars (U.S.) each (for three minutes.) Service spread to other countries, both via London and through direct radio links. Radio-telephone service to Hawaii began in 1931, and to Tokyo in 1934. Telephone service via available radio technology was far from ideal: it was subject to fading and interference, and had strictly limited capacity. In 1956, service to Europe moved to the first transatlantic submarine telephone cable, TAT-1. Transpacific cable service began in 1964. 

The Bell System

For much of its history, AT&T and its Bell System functioned as a legally sanctioned, regulated monopoly. The fundamental principle, formulated by AT&T president Theodore Vail in 1907, was that the telephone by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service. Vail wrote in that year's AT&T Annual Report that government regulation, "provided it is independent, intelligent, considerate, thorough and just," was an appropriate and acceptable substitute for the competitive marketplace.

The United States government accepted this principle, initially in a 1913 agreement known as the Kingsbury Commitment. As part of this agreement, AT&T agreed to connect non-competing independent telephone companies to its network and divest its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph. At several later points, as political philosophy evolved, federal administrations investigated the telephone monopoly in light of general antitrust law and alleged company abuses. One notable result was an anti-trust suit filed in 1949, which led in 1956 to a consent decree signed by AT&T and Department of Justice, and filed in court, whereby AT&T agreed to restrict its activities to the regulated business of the national telephone system and government work.

Over the years AT&T's Bell System provided what was by all accounts the best telephone system in the world. The system made steady progress towards its goal of universal service, which came in the twenties and thirties to mean everyone should have a telephone. The percentage of American households with telephone service reached fifty percent in 1945, seventy percent in 1955, and ninety percent in 1969. Much of the leadership came by application of science and technology developed at AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories subsidiary.

In the late 1940s, new technologies appeared that provided alternatives to copper wires for long-distance telephone transmission. AT&T opened its first microwave relay system between the cities of New York and Boston in 1948, and over the succeeding three decades added considerable microwave capacity to its nationwide long-distance network. In 1962, AT&T placed the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar I, in orbit, offering an additional alternative especially suited to international communications. Technological changes elsewhere in the system offered parallel alternatives. The transition from electromechanical to electronic components permitted new, more powerful, and eventually less expensive customer premises and network equipment. Another result of these new technologies was to lower the technological barriers to entry by would-be competitors to the Bell System. Slowly, over several decades, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulatory agency which oversees telecommunications in the United States, allowed some competition using these technologies at the edges of the network. By the mid-1970s, competition had advanced to general long-distance service.

The changes in telecommunications during these years eventually led to an antitrust suit by the U.S. government against AT&T. The suit began in 1974 and was settled in January 1982 when AT&T agreed to divest itself of the wholly owned Bell operating companies that provided local exchange service. This would, the government believed, separate those parts of AT&T (the local exchanges) where the natural monopoly argument was still seen as valid from those parts (long distance, manufacturing, research and development), where competition was appropriate. In return, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to lift the constraints of the 1956 decree. Divestiture took place on January 1, 1984, and the Bell System was dead. In its place was a new AT&T and seven regional Bell operating companies (collectively, the RBOCs.)

  

Post Divestiture

The United States woke up on January 1, 1984 to discover that its telephones worked just as they had the day before. But AT&T started the day a new company. Of the $149.5 billion in assets it had the day before, it retained $34 billion. Of its 1,009,000 employees it retained 373,000. Gone even was the famous Bell logo and name, given under the agreement to the regional telephone companies, excepting only the name's use in Bell Labs. In its place was a stylized globe and the monogram "AT&T."

 

Success would require no less than the most drastic change in corporate culture ever undertaken by a major American corporation. The old AT&T -- the Bell System -- as a regulated monopoly had been largely insulated from market pressures for most of its history. Its culture venerated service, technological excellence, reliability, and innovation within a non-competitive internally-driven framework of taking however much time and money it took to get things done right. The new AT&T had to learn how to find out and deliver what its customers wanted, when its customers wanted it, in competition with others who sought to fill the same customers' needs. Although AT&T had great technological and personnel strengths upon which to build, the transition proved far more complex than anyone imagined in 1984.

Long distance telephone service became an intensely competitive business. Having started from a monopoly business, it was perhaps inevitable that AT&T's market share would fall. And it did-from over ninety percent in 1984 to around fifty per cent a dozen years later. Between competitive pressure, new technologies (primarily fiber optic transmission) and the shift of some fixed costs to elsewhere, prices plummeted, dropping by an average of forty percent by the end of the 1980s. Volume exploded. In 1984, AT&T carried an average of 37.5 million calls per average business day; in 1989, the equivalent volume was 105.9 million, and in 1999 270 million. In the 1990s, the growth of computers, and then the internet led to an increasing percentage of what customers sent over the network taking the form of data rather than conversation.

AT&T's continued financial strength helped underwrite growth and improvement, from the multi-billion-dollar digitalization of its entire network, through a sustained move into the international market and nearly 200 countries, to major mergers and acquisitions.  One such merger came in 1991 when AT&T acquired computer maker NCR in a $7.3 billion deal designed to give the company's customers an edge as communications and computing converged. Another, the agreement to acquire McCaw Cellular in 1994 for $11.5 billion, gave AT&T direct access to consumers for the first time in a decade. The unit, renamed AT&T Wireless, established AT&T as a leading force in the fast growing wireless telecommunications industry.

The manufacturing operations too faced a transition from monopoly to competition. The largest manufacturing business, recast as AT&T Network Systems, had as its major customers the now independent local telephone companies (RBOCs). Other manufacturers competed for their business and the RBOCs cast an increasingly wary eye on AT&T Network Systems, at times seeing AT&T more as a real and potential competitor than a partner. Network Systems continued as the US market leader, selling both to its traditional customers and to new ones. Network Systems also led the way as AT&T returned to the global arena for the first time in seventy years, establishing plants, subsidiaries, and joint ventures in countries as varied as the Netherlands, Japan, and China.

The corporate strategies and organizations that made sense in the early 1980s, became increasingly problematical as the 1990s progressed. Not only were there few synergies between the communications and manufacturing businesses, but as the US moved toward rewriting its communications laws, the two businesses increasingly became obstacles to each others growth. Still, CEO Robert Allen's announcement on September 20, 1995 that AT&T would be restructuring took nearly everyone by surprise.

  
The New AT&T
 On September 20, 1995, AT&T announced that it was restructuring into three separate publicly traded companies: a systems and equipment company (which became Lucent Technologies,) a computer company (NCR) and a communications services company (which would remain AT&T.) It was the largest voluntary break-up in the history of American business. Lucent became independent on September 30, 1996. NCR followed on January 1, 1997. Employees generally followed their work. While the Bell Laboratories name went to Lucent Technologies, those researchers who supported the communications services business stayed with AT&T as the staff of the new AT&T Labs.

The new AT&T began evolving from a long distance company to an integrated voice and data communications company, as an ever increasing percentage of the traffic on its network was data, and to a lesser extent video, rather than voice. AT&T worked to reenter the local telephone service business, as envisioned by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. AT&T realized that as a result of this new law, the stand-alone long distance business was likely to decline. The company successfully launched an Internet service, AT&T WorldNet® Service , while selling operations, such as AT&T Submarine Systems and Skynet Satellite Services, that no longer were a strategic fit.

Over the next four years, AT&T took many actions to succeed in the changing environment. The company invested over $35 billion in acquisitions and upgrades to its infrastructure both to manage ever-increasing volumes of internet protocol and other data traffic, and to establish direct local connections to business customers. AT&T acquired a leading provider of local telephone service to business customers (TCG.) It acquired a leading provider of global data networking services (IBM Global Network.) It merged with two large cable companies, (TCI and MediaOne.) Operating as AT&T Broadband, the unit became the largest cable company in the United States.
By mid-2000, AT&T had three rapidly evolving networks- data, broadband, and wireless, and four separate businesses-cable, wireless, business, and consumer. And in 2000, the volume of data traffic for the first time exceeded the volume of voice traffic on the AT&T network.
In October 2000, AT&T announced that it would restructure over the next two years into a family of separate publicly held companies: AT&T Wireless, AT&T Broadband, and AT&T. In this way, each business could best obtain the capital structure needed to fund its growth. AT&T Wireless became an independent company on July 9, 2001. On December 9, 2001, AT&T and the cable-operator Comcast reached a definitive agreement to merge AT&T Broadband with Comcast. The businesses completed their merger on November 18, 2002, and began combined operations as the Comcast Corporation.
With the completion of the restructuring, David W. Dorman succeeded C. Michael Armstrong as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AT&T in November 2002.
As Dorman assumed leadership of AT&T, the global telecommunications industry entered an era of unprecedented chaos and instability – marked by oversupply, fraud, a complicated regulatory environment and nonstop pricing pressures. Combined, these forces led to an industry meltdown in which numerous bankruptcies, defaults and business failures occurred; investors lost billions and countless workers in the communications sector lost their jobs.
To address the dynamic environment, Dorman led an aggressive strategic transformation to fundamentally reshape AT&T – to evolve from a consumer-oriented voice company to an enterprise-focused networking company. The redesigned AT&T became a global IP networking provider dedicated to delivering powerful networks, applications and capabilities to business and government customers. Concurrently, AT&T introduced a breakthrough alternative to traditional services – VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol – for consumers and small businesses.

In January 2005, the most profound aspect of AT&T's ongoing transformation was announced: the pending $16 billion merger with SBC Communications to create the industry’s premier communications and networking company. Through this deal, the people of AT&T have the opportunity to build the defining entity in global communications for the 21st century – a company capable of delivering advanced networking technologies and a full suite of integrated communications services throughout America and around the world.
March 2005

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