SBC Communications

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This article refers to the now defunct SBC Communications, Inc. that purchased AT&T Corp. in 2005 and changed its name to AT&T Inc. For information on that new company, please see the article AT&T.

SBC Communications, Inc.
Type	Defunct
Founded	1984
Headquarters	San Antonio, Texas, USA
Industry	Telecommunications
Products	Telephone, Internet, Television
Slogan	Going beyond the call.

Southwestern Bell Corporation, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, was one of the seven original Regional Bell Operating Companies, or "Baby Bells." The company — a holding company for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company — was a result of U.S. antitrust action against AT&T in 1983. AT&T had adopted the name Southwestern Bell for its local operations in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas in April 1920.

In 1993 Southwestern Bell Corp. moved its headquarters to San Antonio, Texas, and, during its annual meeting of stockholders in 1995, the company announced that its name would be changed to SBC Communications, Inc. The name change was an effort to reinforce the company's national and global reach and the company not only stated that "SBC" wasn't an acronym for Southwestern Bell Corporation, but that it did not stand for anything at all.

SBC then proceeded (as permitted by the Telecommunications Act of 1996) to acquire fellow baby bell Pacific Telesis, the Regional Bell operating company serving Nevada and California, in 1997 and the former independent Bell System franchise SNET (Southern New England Telephone).

SBC then announced plans to acquire Ameritech, the Regional Bell operating company serving Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and told the FCC that it would allow competitors access to local markets where it had had a monopoly if the FCC would allow them to acquire Ameritech. The FCC agreed and in May 1998, SBC and Ameritech announced the merger would move forward. After making several organizational changes (such as the sale of Ameritech Wireless to GTE) to satisfy state and Federal regulators, the two merged on October 8, 1999. The FCC later fined SBC Communications $6 million for failure to comply with agreements made in order to secure approval of the merger.

In 2002, SBC ended marketing its operating companies under different names, and simply opted to give its companies different doing business as names based on the state (a practice already in use by Ameritech since 1993), and it gave the holding companies it had purchased d/b/a names based on their general region. The following list is the result, with holding companies in bold:

• SBC Communications, Inc.
  • SBC Arkansas (Southwestern Bell Telephone, L.P.)
  • SBC Kansas (Southwestern Bell Telephone, L.P.)
  • SBC Missouri (Southwestern Bell Telephone, L.P.)
  • SBC Oklahoma (Southwestern Bell Telephone, L.P.)
  • SBC Southwest (Southwestern Bell Telephone, L.P. as a whole)
  • SBC Texas (Southwestern Bell Telephone, L.P.)
  • SBC West (Pacific Telesis Group)
    • SBC California (Pacific Bell Telephone Company)
    • SBC Nevada (Nevada Bell Telephone Company)
  • SBC East (Southern New England Telecommunications Corporation)
    • SBC SNET (The Southern New England Telephone Company)
    • SBC Woodbury (The Woodbury Telephone Company)
  • SBC Midwest (SBC Teleholdings, Inc., the name adopted for Ameritech in 2003)
    • SBC Illinois (Illinois Bell Telephone Company)
    • SBC Indiana (Indiana Bell Telephone Company, Inc.)
    • SBC Michigan (Michigan Bell Telephone Company)
    • SBC Ohio (The Ohio Bell Telephone Company)
    • SBC Wisconsin (Wisconsin Bell, Inc.)

At the time of SBC's purchase of AT&T in 2005, SBC provided local telephone service in 13 states (Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin), provided long distance service to 10 million customers and owned 60% of mobile phone provider Cingular Wireless, the largest mobile phone service provider in the United States. BellSouth, in a joint venture with AT&T Inc., owns the remaining 40% of Cingular Wireless. The company was also an Internet Service Provider and the largest DSL provider in the US, with more than 5.1 million DSL subscribers as of late 2005.