AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's third-largest telecommunications company by revenue, the third-largest wireless carrier in the United States behind T-Mobile and Verizon, and the country's largest fibre internet provider.
| AT&T Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | NYSE: T |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Founded | 1885 (original company); 1 January 1984 (as Southwestern Bell Corporation) |
| Founder | Alexander Graham Bell (predecessor) |
| Headquarters | Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States |
| Area served | United States, Mexico |
| Key people | John Stankey (chairman and CEO) |
| Products | Wireless service, fibre broadband, business connectivity |
| Services | AT&T Mobility, AT&T Fiber, AT&T Business |
| Revenue | US$125.6 billion (2024) |
| Subsidiaries | AT&T Communications, AT&T Mexico |
| Website | att.com |
The company has more than 240 million subscribers worldwide, organised into a Communications segment covering wireless, broadband and business solutions, and a Latin America segment providing wireless service in Mexico. It ranked 37th on the 2025 Fortune 500.
AT&T's corporate identity is complicated. While it claims the history of the original company founded in 1885, the modern entity began on 1 January 1984 as Southwestern Bell Corporation, one of the regional companies created by the breakup of the Bell System. Southwestern Bell, later SBC Communications, bought its own former parent in 2005 and adopted its name. All filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission before 2005 are under SBC rather than AT&T.
History
The Bell System, 1877 to 1981
Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone on 7 March 1876 and co-founded the Bell Telephone Company on 9 July 1877 with Thomas A. Watson, Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Thomas A. Sanders. Bell himself lost interest in telephony by the 1890s and sold his holdings. The company concentrated on building local exchanges, opening the first commercial exchange in New Haven, Connecticut, and by the end of 1877 more than 700 telephones were in use.
An early rival was Western Union, then the dominant telegraph company, which also owned the equipment manufacturer Western Electric. Bell acquired Western Electric in 1881, and on 3 March 1885 established the American Telephone and Telegraph Company as its long-distance subsidiary. Construction of what became AT&T Long Lines had begun in 1880. Theodore Newton Vail served as first president, stepping down after a few years.
When Bell's telephone patent expired, more than 6,000 telephone companies emerged and Bell Telephone suffered a serious downturn. On 30 December 1899 American Bell transferred its subsidiaries to AT&T, giving the long-distance company control of Western Electric, Bell Laboratories, the Bell System and international holdings including Northern Electric and Bell Canada.
By 1907 AT&T controlled more than 80 per cent of the American telephone market and Vail returned as president. He negotiated with competitors, charging them for connection to AT&T's long-distance network, a practice that gave AT&T decisive leverage: an independent telephone company without long-distance access could not serve customers who wished to call other cities. The Justice Department moved to break up the company, and a settlement was reached in the Kingsbury Commitment of 13 December 1913, which brought federal oversight and effectively converted the Bell System monopoly into a regulated one.
In 1921 AT&T served over 64 per cent of the nearly 14 million telephones in the United States. By the 1930s its share reached 83 per cent of telephones, 98 per cent of long-distance lines and 90 per cent of equipment manufacturing. It had become a natural monopoly sustained by federal oversight through the Great Depression, the Second World War and the postwar decades.
The arrangement had genuine benefits. Bell Labs, funded from monopoly revenues, produced the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix and the C programming language, an output of fundamental research that no comparably structured institution has matched since.
Antitrust and breakup
Following the 1974 modification of the final judgement, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against AT&T. United States v. American Telephone and Telegraph Co. ran for nearly eight years until AT&T settled in 1982, agreeing to divest the Bell System. It retained its long lines and technology divisions and gained the freedom to enter industries from which regulation had excluded it.
On 1 January 1984 the local operating companies were separated into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, informally the Baby Bells. Southwestern Bell Corporation, later SBC Communications, was among them and was the smallest.
Divergent paths, 1982 to 2004
The original AT&T Corporation continued in long distance but faced growing competition from MCI and Sprint. It made a series of acquisitions including the Metromedia mobile business in 1987 and several cable companies in the early 1990s, spun off Lucent Technologies, and later divested its wireless and broadband units. C. Michael Armstrong became chief executive in early 1997, appointing John Zeglis president later that year. By 1998 the company was in the top 15 of the Fortune 500, and it was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1999 until 2015.
SBC meanwhile grew by acquisition, buying two other Baby Bells, Pacific Telesis Group and Ameritech, while selling its cable business. It relocated its headquarters from St. Louis to San Antonio in 1992.
SBC acquires AT&T, 2005 to 2013
On 18 November 2005 SBC Communications purchased its former parent, AT&T Corporation, for 16 billion dollars, and adopted the better-known AT&T name and brand. The original AT&T Corporation continued as the long-distance landline subsidiary of the merged company.
AT&T acquired BellSouth Corporation on 29 December 2006 following Federal Communications Commission approval, consolidating ownership of Cingular Wireless and reuniting four of the seven Baby Bells. It rebranded its wireless retail stores from Cingular to AT&T in January 2007. The company moved its headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas in 2008, citing better access to global customers, operations, technology partners and talent.
In 2011 AT&T bid 39 billion dollars in cash and stock for T-Mobile. It withdrew the offer in the face of substantial regulatory and legal obstacles and firm opposition from the United States government. Under the terms of the agreement T-Mobile received three billion dollars in cash and access to one billion dollars of AT&T wireless spectrum, a break fee that materially strengthened the competitor AT&T had sought to buy.
In September 2013 AT&T announced expansion into Latin America in collaboration with América Móvil, and in December it agreed to sell its Connecticut wireline operations to Frontier Communications.
The media strategy, 2014 to 2022
In late 2014 AT&T purchased the Mexican carrier Iusacell and, two months later, the Mexican wireless business of NII Holdings, merging them as AT&T Mexico. In July 2015 it bought DirecTV for 48.5 billion dollars, announcing plans to converge its U-verse home internet and IPTV brands with DirecTV as AT&T Entertainment.
On 22 October 2016 AT&T announced a deal to buy Time Warner for 108.7 billion dollars. On 20 November 2017 the assistant attorney general Makan Delrahim filed suit to block the merger, arguing that it would harm competition, raise consumer bills and reduce innovation. On 12 June 2018 District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that the merger could proceed, and it closed two days later, with Time Warner becoming a wholly owned subsidiary renamed WarnerMedia.
Three months afterwards AT&T reorganised into four units: Communications, covering wireline telephony, AT&T Mobility and consumer entertainment video; WarnerMedia, covering Turner, Warner Bros. and HBO; AT&T Latin America; and Advertising and Analytics, later renamed Xandr.
The strategy was to build a vertically integrated media and telecommunications group in which distribution and content reinforced each other. It did not work. The anticipated synergies did not materialise, the acquisitions left the company with roughly 200 billion dollars of debt, and management attention was divided between two industries with little operational overlap.
In September 2019 the activist investor Elliott Management disclosed a 3.2 billion dollar holding, a 1.2 per cent interest, and pressed for divestitures. On 4 March 2020 AT&T announced major cost reductions including cuts to capital investment. On 24 April 2020 it announced that the chief operating officer John Stankey would replace Randall L. Stephenson as chief executive from 1 July.
The unwinding followed quickly. Crunchyroll was sold to Sony's Funimation for 1.175 billion dollars in December 2020. On 25 February 2021 AT&T announced the spin-off of DirecTV, U-verse TV and DirecTV Stream into a separate entity, selling 30 per cent to TPG Capital and retaining 70 per cent, closing on 2 August 2021. On 17 May 2021 it announced that it would relinquish its equity in WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery, Inc. in a 43 billion dollar transaction, completed on 8 April 2022 to form Warner Bros. Discovery. Xandr and AppNexus were sold to Microsoft in a deal announced in December 2021 and completed in June 2022. AT&T and TPG closed the sale of the remaining 70 per cent of DirecTV on 2 July 2025.
The episode is commonly cited as one of the most value-destructive corporate strategies of the period, with AT&T having spent more than 150 billion dollars on DirecTV and Time Warner and exited both at a substantial loss.
Return to connectivity, 2022 onward
AT&T has since concentrated on 5G wireless and fibre. On 21 May 2025 it agreed to purchase the mass-market fibre business of Lumen Technologies for 5.75 billion dollars, extending its terrestrial broadband footprint across additional states including most of the former US West territory. The transaction excluded Lumen's legacy copper consumer network, scheduled for retirement, and closed on 2 February 2026.
In September 2025 the company announced a partnership with Gigs enabling technology companies including Klarna and Walmart's OnePay to launch their own mobile services.
In January 2026 AT&T announced that it would move its headquarters from Dallas to a 54-acre campus in Plano, Texas, with the move expected to begin in late 2028.
Operations
AT&T Communications is the principal segment, serving more than 100 million American customers with wireless, broadband and business connectivity.
The global headquarters has been at Whitacre Tower in Dallas since the 2008 relocation. The Telecom Operations group serving residential and regional business customers across 22 states remains in San Antonio. Atlanta is the headquarters of AT&T Mobility, with significant offices in Redmond and Bothell, Washington, Redmond being the former home of AT&T Wireless. Bedminster, New Jersey houses Global Business Services and AT&T Labs, and St. Louis remains home to directory operations. The company's Asia-Pacific regional headquarters is in Hong Kong.
Controversies
Warrantless surveillance
AT&T's cooperation with United States intelligence agencies has been the subject of sustained litigation and public controversy. In 2006 the former technician Mark Klein disclosed the existence of Room 641A, a secure facility at the company's San Francisco switching centre through which internet traffic was reportedly copied and routed to the National Security Agency. The Electronic Frontier Foundation brought a class action, Hepting v. AT&T, which was effectively terminated by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had assisted in warrantless surveillance. Documents disclosed in 2013 and later indicated that AT&T had been among the most extensive corporate participants in NSA collection programmes.
Data throttling
The Federal Trade Commission sued AT&T in 2014 over the throttling of customers on plans sold as unlimited, alleging that speeds were reduced by as much as 90 per cent after modest data use without adequate disclosure. The FCC separately proposed a 100 million dollar fine in 2015. After protracted litigation over whether the FTC had jurisdiction over a common carrier, AT&T agreed in 2019 to pay 60 million dollars to settle the FTC action, with funds distributed to affected customers.
Time Warner merger
The Justice Department's unsuccessful challenge to the Time Warner acquisition was the first major vertical merger case brought by the United States in decades. Critics of the transaction argued that combining the largest pay television distributor with a major content owner would allow AT&T to raise prices for rival distributors seeking HBO and Turner programming. The court rejected the government's economic case. The subsequent failure of the merger on commercial grounds, and the sale of WarnerMedia four years later, left both supporters and opponents of the case claiming vindication.
2024 Snowflake data breach
In 2024 AT&T was among the clients of Snowflake Inc. affected by a mass data breach. Phone and text records from 1 May to 31 October 2022 covering nearly all AT&T customers were exposed. The incident was the first in which the Justice Department asked a company to delay filing a disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission because of potential national security or public safety concerns. AT&T was also reported to have been affected in 2024 by the Salt Typhoon advanced persistent threat, attributed to the Chinese government, which targeted lawful intercept systems at multiple American carriers.
Debt and shareholder returns
The debt accumulated through the DirecTV and Time Warner acquisitions, peaking near 200 billion dollars, forced a reduction in AT&T's dividend in 2022, ending a long record of increases that had made the stock a staple of income portfolios. The episode is frequently cited in discussions of the risks of debt-financed diversification by regulated utilities.
Copper network retirement
AT&T's programme to retire legacy copper telephone lines in favour of wireless and fibre has drawn objections from consumer advocates and state regulators, particularly regarding rural customers and the reliability of emergency calling during power outages. The company argues that maintaining a century-old network for a shrinking number of subscribers is not sustainable, and regulators have generally permitted retirement subject to conditions on replacement service.
See also
References