AT&T, BellSouth merger to spur fixed mobile convergence

Bigger may be better if AT&T’s $67 billion offer for BellSouth gets past government watchdogs, which it is expected to do. According to several industry analysts, a key benefit to AT&T’s enterprise customers will come from the convergence of wired and wireless networks.

As long as AT&T shares ownership of Cingular with smaller rival BellSouth, it’s limited in the services it can offer, according to Frank Dzubeck, senior analyst at Communications Network Architects.

“They owned half of Cingular, but they couldn’t do anything with it. Now they have the flexibility to do all sorts of things with their biggest customers,” Dzubeck said.

Large businesses can expect more bundled services. The hot acronym of the day is FMC (fixed mobile convergence). In other words, look for services that enable communication across a range of devices and connections. The telecoms see their future profits in converged FMC services, whether the payload is voice, video, or data, according to Stephane Teral, directing analyst at Infonetics Research. Communications Network’s Dzubeck adds that, eventually, consolidated billing alone could save enterprises millions by reducing the number of times accounting departments need to touch bills.

John McGrory, CEO of Edge Dynamics, a company that supplies hosted transaction-level business intelligence to large pharmaceuticals, said he looks forward to working with an infrastructure provider that can offer it all. “Companies the magnitude of Verizon and AT&T have the resources to offer almost any kind of service to an enterprise, anything short of business consulting and application management,” McGrory said.