Just to tilt at windmills for a moment: in comments about the iPhone I have seen several references to how good Cingular was before AT&T bought it and ruined it. I realize that the people writing these comments probably still had blue toy phones with cartoon characters on them when all this happened, but still:
There are three major players in this story. AT&T (Ma Bell), which was split up into several Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), and two of those Baby Bells, Southwestern Bell and BellSouth (itself formed by the merger of two original RBOCs, Southern Bell and South Central Bell). Over the course of years, all three companies bought or built their way into the mobile phone business. Eventually, Southwestern Bell (which along the way renamed itself to SBC) and BellSouth pooled their resources and launched Cingular, selling off a few licenses and combining other resources and smaller brands under the giant umbrella with the orange splat logo. SBC owned 60% of Cingular and BellSouth owned 40%.
Years passed.
AT&T mismanaged and squandered itself into fourth place in the mobile phone market, and as part of a last-ditch effort to rebuild the company it broke itself up (again), splitting AT&T Wireless into a separate company. And then (2004) it sold that fourth-place company to Cingular, reserving the right to take the name AT&T Wireless back when everything was done so it could start all over again. Cingular began the process of subsuming AT&T Wireless’ assets and customers and erasing the AT&T Wireless name from everything, during which time if you were a customer you might have heard some lingo about “orange” (Cingular through-and-through) or “blue” (formerly AT&T), since aside from marketing these were still two very different companies. Billing was different, provisioning was different, and heaven help you if you tried to upgrade your phone (it took me two and a half hours on the phone with enterprise business support to get a new phone).
And then (2005): SBC basically said, “what the heck,” and bought the rest of AT&T, which hadn’t even had the chance to launch a new AT&T Wireless yet. When it got regulatory clearance for the purchase it turned around and renamed itself AT&T, and since SBC owned 60% of Cingular that became AT&T Wireless once and for all.
And then (2006) for good measure AT&T (née SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell) bought BellSouth and became the 100% owner of AT&T Wireless (formerly Cingular, containing the remnants of the old AT&T Wireless).
On no planet did the company that once was AT&T buy Cingular. It happened the other way around.
