AT&T: Becoming a Leader in Network Expansion

Introduction The American Telephone and Telegraph Company’s (AT&T) history goes back to the year of 1875 when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. In the 19th century, AT&T became the owner of the Bell system company. The bell system was well known for the best telephone service in the country. The first telephone exchange, operating under license from Bell Telephone, opened in New Haven, CT in 1878. Within three years, telephone exchanges existed in most major cities and towns in the United States, operating under licenses from what was now the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1882, American Bell acquired a controlling interest in the Western Electric Company, which became its manufacturing unit (The History of AT&T, 2010). In 1984, bell systems decided to break into eight companies by agreement with U.S. Department of Justice and AT&T. The fundamental principle, formulated by AT&T president Theodore Vail in 1907, that the telephone by the foundation of the new technology of nature and that will operate mainly on the efficiency as a monopoly by providing universal service in the United States. AT& T began restructuring and downsizing in 1995, more than a decade after breaking up the Bell System to settle a Federal antitrust suit (Lander, 1995). Robert Allen aggressively sought to undertake a turnaround of the organization by, among other things, leading the strategic restructuring of AT&T that would see the giant company split into three separate publicly traded global companies. He proposed that the new companies would focus on different core businesses – network communication, communication equipment, and transaction-intensive computing. In 1996, AT&T started to take a turn and started to integrate telecommunications services