Ten Years Ago... AT&T Is Venturing Cautiously Into Local Telephone Business

AT&T Is Venturing Cautiously Into Local Telephone Business
[SOURCE: New York Times 1/28/1997, AUTHOR: Mark Landler]
The AT&T Corporation announced its first significant foray into the local telephone business ten years ago. But the modest scope of the two new services underscored that AT&T was tiptoeing into this $100 billion market, even a year after passage of the 1996 Telecom Act opened the market to competition. AT&T said it would offer local phone service to small- and medium-size business customers in California. The long-distance carrier would not build its own local operations but would lease lines on the existing local network of Pacific Telesis Group. Industry experts said AT&T's go-slow approach was evidence that the new law was not unleashing the competition that many experts had predicted.
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