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Cingular/ATTW merger cleared - overview of US wireless carrier market

The proposed merger between US mobile carriers AT&T Wireless and Cingular has been cleared this week. The new company will be called Cingular (see below for full story on the name confusion). This should come as a relief to my friend Bill Crocca, who took a job to rearchitect the companies’ network and systems a couple months ago.

The merger will create a behemoth to challenge Verizon Wireless’ dominance of the US cellular market (see below for background on the standards battle), but is formed from two companies that are, in many minds, damaged goods. See Mike Masnick’s piece on TheFeature for some technical details and analysis.

For more background information about AT&T Wireless’ plight and situation, see The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which ran a piece on 21 September entitled Fall of AT&T Wireless gives a thorough history of the company and its troubles.

If that’s not enough, more subtle challenges exist for the company though — see Seattle’s BizJournal’s discussion of the mess around ownership of the AT&T Wireless brand. Under the terms of the spinout arrangement with AT&T, ATTW loses branding rights the name 6 months after the deal with Cingular closes.

The most interesting discussion on this came from The Wall Street Journal from 17 August - Olympics Are an Odd Stage For AT&T Brands (this is a premium article, so purchase access). I read it back then, and it’s stayed in my mind. The article is definitely worth the $2.95, giving a very ironic view of the marketing challenges the new Cingular will face. In what sounds like an almost insurmountable situation, they’ve lost rights to the AT&T Wireless name and brand, with AT&T itself planning on launching a new company called AT&T Wireless in the near future. That’s sure to cause confusion and trouble for Cingular.

For a sense of the issues underlying the battles between Verizon Wireless (CDMA network for voice and data, Qualcomm’s Brew for applications) and the other US carriers - Spring, ATTW, Cingular, T-Mobile - who use TDMA and use GSM for voice and GPRS for data (and a looser J2ME infrastructure for applications)– a tremendously complicated matter — look at this overview piece from ZDNet back in 2003. The explanations there are still valid. For a sense of where the current debate is check out this piece from TechDirt.

For sense of the issues between Brew and J2ME, see this piece from TheFeature about Nokia creating its own application delivery intrastructure, Preminet. Under the vision, Preminet will perform for the J2ME/Symbian community much of the same role as Qualcomm has provided for the Brew folks - a seamless, process-driven pipeline for application testing, acceptance, delivery and billing.