You've got to remember that "at&t" (the current one) is not AT&T, the remains of The Bell System resulting from the 1983 divestiture.
SBC, which started out as a Regional Bell Operating Company named "Southwestern Bell", bought the old AT&T at firesale prices back in 2005 and assumed its corporate livery.
SBC and Southwestern Bell before it, never made a secret of thinking that the 1983 Bell System breakup was a mistake, and has spent the last 28 years trying to put the Bell System monopoly back into place.
Wait...but it is the AT&T from the Bell System. The fact that it was one of the spin-offs buying back the mothership probably has little consequence in terms of attitudes and/or business strategy. I imagine the AT&T ethos of old was pretty well spread between all the "Baby" bells and "Mama" Bell.
Also, you forgot the part where shortly after SBC bought AT&T, the "new" AT&T bought Cingular, a partnership between Bell South and the former AT&T. Oh, and the part where before buying AT&T, SBC also bought Ameritech, the parent company of the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin "Baby" Bells, and Pacific Telesis, the parent company of Pacbell and Nevada Bell.
...and what of the other "Baby" Bells? Well, Bell Atlantic and NYNEX combined to form a company you may have heard of: Verizon!
That picture is not very accurate. It makes it seem as though USWest simply changed their name to QWest, in reality they got bought by QWest which was a young (founded in 1996) company which had been focusing on fiber optic runs up until they bought a for-reals telecom. I'm sure there are other inaccuracies, that one seemed particularly glaring.
It's riddled with mistakes. SNET was never part of AT&T. GTE and Contel merged, keeping the GTE name, so GTE should be next to Contel. BOCs should be before the 7 RBOCs as part of AT&T. Many missing like NY Tel and NE Tel which became the NYNEX RBOC. MCI line should start with MCI. There are others, and arguably the Sprint/United connection needs to be with GTE. Nice idea, but I hope nobody uses this for serious information.
It seems to imply that Bell Atlantic et all merged to become Verizon around 2000.
Bell Atlantic merged with NYNEX in 1997.
In 1999 Vodafone merged with Airtouch to become Vodafone Airtouch in the US.
Vodafone-Airtouch in that same year went after PrimeCo and merged with it.
Verizon Communications is actually the result of the Bell Atlantic and GTE merger of 2000 (signed 1998).
GTE was not a Bell. Neither was Contel which was acquired by GTE in 1991 (so they should both be on the same level).
Verizon Wireless is a joint venture signed in 1999 and begun real operations 2000 between then Bell Mobile. and Vodafone-Airtouch-Primeco.
Finally in 2005, Verizon Wireless bought MCI.
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Looking back on things, the chart really only shows named succession. It doesn't attempt at all to do what you're expect---place companies on a family tree.
Amazing that a monopoly could eventually go bankrupt. People get paid millions a year to run companies like that into the ground. Charlie Sheen could do no worse.
The original AT&T, before SBC takeover, failed to implement number portability by the late 2004 deadline that all other wireless companies hit. They also "botched" a CRM system upgrade.
Charlie Sheen might have gotten it done better, it's hard to say. If he can listen to "the little people" telling him that problems are imminent, then maybe he could have averted AT&T's downfall.
SBC, which started out as a Regional Bell Operating Company named "Southwestern Bell", bought the old AT&T at firesale prices back in 2005 and assumed its corporate livery.
SBC and Southwestern Bell before it, never made a secret of thinking that the 1983 Bell System breakup was a mistake, and has spent the last 28 years trying to put the Bell System monopoly back into place.
So, yes, AT&T is a monopoly in the making.