Wall St. Cheers Phone Deal; AT&T to Cut 10,000 More Jobs

[BR_Parkway]

What an absolutely incredible headline.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/business/06cnd-phone.html?hp&ex=1141707600&en=c96cd3de59a97d79&ei=5094&partner=homepage

AT&T's proposed $67 billion purchase of BellSouth was received warmly by Wall Street today, and even critics who expressed concerns about the acquisition's impact on competition acknowledged that the deal should easily win regulatory approval.

The deal will go a long way toward recreating the original AT&T before it was split up in 1984 to settle an antitrust case, and it will consolidate AT&T's control over Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest cellphone company, and give AT&T greater influence over changes reshaping the telecommunications industry.

Moreover, AT&T expects to reduce costs with the BellSouth merger. The company said today that it would cut 10,000 jobs once the deal is complete. These cuts would come in addition to the 26,000 positions it had previously said it would eliminate from 2006 to 2008 as part of the previous merger of AT&T and SBC Communications. AT&T and BellSouth employ a combined total of 371,000 workers and have $120 billion in sales.

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Consumer advocates said the deal should heighten worries about the increasing control that a few large telephone and cable television companies exert over Internet access. That concern has been stoked by recent suggestions by phone and cable executives that they would like to charge the providers of Internet content, and possibly also consumers, for the network capacity they use in addition to the subscription charges paid by individuals for unlimited access to the Internet.