SBC wraps up $16 billion AT&T acquisition

CHICAGO — SBC Communications completed its acquisition of AT&T on Friday after California regulators approved the $16 billion deal.

The new, bigger SBC will be called AT&T and is the nation's largest telecommunications company.

SBC will unveil a new AT&T logo Monday as it outlines plans for changing the name of the merged company. During the transition, the firm likely will introduce some combination of the SBC and AT&T brands, much as it did while phasing out the Ameritech brand in the Midwest after taking over that company in 1999.

"As soon as customer awareness of the new AT&T brand is high, the transition will be finalized," said Cathy Coughlin, president of SBC Midwest.

"But this doesn't just involve putting the AT&T name on customer bills and advertising. It also requires changing logos and signs on more than 50,000 vehicles and thousands of buildings, so we don't have a specific timeline yet."

The combined company will adopt AT&T's stock symbol, "T," on the New York Stock Exchange.

When the acquisition was announced in January, the companies said it could take more than a year to close the deal, but SBC Chairman Edward Whitacre pushed for closing the transaction by December.

California regulators also gave the go-ahead to the $7.5 billion takeover of MCI by Verizon Communications. That deal is expected to close by early January.

The two megamergers position MCI/Verizon and AT&T/SBC to compete head-to-head in providing communication services to large enterprises, markets that AT&T and MCI have dominated.

Representatives of Verizon and SBC have been mum about what the merger may mean for residential customers, but SBC's announcement Friday hinted that something is in the works.

"The new AT&T companies will make cost-competitive, convenient communications service bundles available to millions of new U.S. customers," it said. "Details about those bundles will be available in the coming weeks."