Ok, here's the deal: AT&T was the god of communications. Then they were broken up. Then, in the span of a couple years, cingular bought their cell phone service, SBC bought their long distance, and comcast bought their cable. They went from being one of the biggest companies in the world to not existing in a few years by being split into pieces, with the weird result that there are "AT&Ts" out there that provide different services owned by different companies.