I had a call from a Wall Street sell side analyst with one of the bigger firms yesterday as I was racing through the airport in Philadelphia yesterday enroute back to San Diego.
The analyst wanted some “andy insight” on the post AT&T/SBC merger.
Here’s a quick summary:
On Quest merging with MCI: One company that was run by a known alleged set of crooks merging with another where it was suspected there were crooks. My suggestion is that the new logo include pinstripes.
On the state of VoIP–Vonage is in trouble. With SBC merging with AT&T the heat has to be on Jeff Citron to make a big deal with someone.
On What the Merger Means–Why does SBC need Delta Three any longer. Everything that Delta Three could offer AT*T already has.
On what I think is next–The most logical merger is Verizon with BellSouth. Then the merged company sells off Cingular to SBC and buys out Vodafone. They will need that because AT&T already has a plan to roll out its own enterprise VoIP based mobile service. (Heck, maybe Voadfone comes in and buys up Cingular from SBC/AT&T. The USA becomes a huge CDMA market with only two foreign carriers delivering GSM.)
Whos Next
You know, reading a recent Andy Abramson blog entry about the different telecom mergers reminds me of an old Tom Lehrer song by the same name: Whos Next. The song has nothing to do with telecommunications, but rather who has…