AT&T Wireless Services

» see attwireless.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In January 2002 a commercial ran during the Golden Globes that explained nothing. More followed, all of them vague and faintly philosophical, all of them ending on the word mLife, and for a few weeks American advertising people argued about whether it was a drug or a hoax. The answer arrived during Super Bowl XXXVI in February: it was AT&T Wireless, and mLife meant mobile life. MetLife sued to stop the advertising, AT&T Wireless called the suit without merit, and the campaign was eventually dropped for something about reaching out.

The company underneath the mystery was serious. It had started as Craig McCaw's cellular business, which bought MCI's cellular and paging operations in 1986 for $122 million and took the McCaw Cellular name. AT&T Corporation bought a third of it in November 1992, when it had two million Cellular One subscribers and $1.75 billion of annual revenue, then paid $11.5 billion for the rest in 1994. In April 2000 the wireless arm was given a tracking stock in what was then the largest initial public offering in the world, and in July 2001 it became a separate company rather than a division.

Turkey never had a wireless market that looked like this. GSM arrived here in 1994 and that was simply what a mobile phone was. One standard, and no question of which technology your carrier had picked. AT&T Wireless spent its last years running a TDMA network with a GSM overlay bolted on top, because American carriers had each chosen their own technology in the 1980s and then had to live inside the choice.

~ the dossier ~

~ what mlife was ~

The mLife campaign is worth keeping because of what it was trying to do. The pitch was that the phone was no longer a telephone, that it had become the place your life was kept, which was a reasonable prediction in 2002 and an expensive thing to spend a Super Bowl slot on when the product could barely send a picture.

The campaign was later stretched over mMode, the carrier's branded data service, where mobile life turned out to mean ringtones and horoscopes at a dollar apiece.

~ the porting ~

At the end of 2003 the FCC made carriers let customers take their phone numbers with them when they left. AT&T Wireless built a new system to handle adding subscribers and porting numbers in and out, and the implementation failed in public. Orders stalled and transfers hung for weeks, and people who had spent years complaining about coverage now had a legal way out of it.

On 13 February 2004 the board began accepting bids. Vodafone and Cingular were the two that mattered, and on 17 February Cingular won by agreeing to pay more than $41 billion, better than twice what the market had been valuing the company at. With the debt assumed, the Associated Press put the total at $46.7 billion, and the company's own spokesman called it the largest all-cash transaction in United States history. Combined, the two carriers were projected to hold 46 million subscribers and pass Verizon's 37.5 million.

~ who owns the name ~

The sale closed on 26 October 2004. The stores were rebranded Cingular on 16 November, and the AT&T Wireless brand was formally retired on 26 April 2005, six months to the day after the close.

There was a clause from the spin-off that made the ending odd. If AT&T Wireless was ever bought by a competitor, the rights to its name and to the AT&T name in wireless service reverted to AT&T Corporation. So Cingular could not keep the brand it had just paid $41 billion to acquire. Then SBC bought AT&T Corporation in November 2005 and took the AT&T name for itself. It finished acquiring BellSouth at the end of 2006, and in 2007 Cingular became AT&T Mobility. The letters came back and the company that had carried them did not.

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