Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Buh-bye Cingular!

By

Soon we won’t have Cingular to kick around anymore. Beginning Monday, a new advertising campaign will get underway in which Cingular—the largest wireless phone network in the U.S.—will see its identity taken away and replaced with that of the newly reconstituted AT&T. For a short time, the shift will be marked by a transitional graphic that contains both the AT&T and Cingular logos, but eventually the AT&T logo will take center stage on all customer communications and advertising, as well as on company buildings, vehicles, and retail outlets.

“Around the world, our customers recognize the AT&T brand for meaningful innovation, a commitment to customer service, high quality and exceptional reliability,” said Edward E. Whitacre Jr., chairman and CEO of AT&T, in a release. “AT&T, BellSouth, and Cingular are now one company, and going to market with our services under one brand is the right thing to do.”

Recommended Videos

The path to AT&T controlling Cingular is tortuous: AT&T Wireless started off as a separate company spun off from the original AT&T; Cingular bought AT&T Wireless and killed off the brand…but then one of Cingular’s owners, SBC, bought what remained of the original AT&T and took the brand for its landline services. This new AT&T later bought BellSouth—which just happened to be Cingular’s other owner. And now everything is AT&T all over again.

Not that Cingular hasn’t left some bad blood in its wake: a pending class action suit against the company alleges it intentionally let service on the AT&T Wireless network degrade as a way to get customers to switch to Cingular…and then charged them early termination fees on top of account origination fees to do so.

Lest one think the rebranding is a nostalgia trip being enjoyed by titans of industry longing for the mean old days of Ma Bell, it ain’t so: the new AT&T is all about brand consolidation and cutting operating expenses. The company said 20 percent of the cost cutting it will achieve through its merger with BellSouth will come just in the form of consolidated advertising.

AT&T’s add campaign to announce the demise of the Cingular brand will take several forms, co-opting elements of Cinglar’s “raising the bar” campaign in television and print; the company will also transition branding in retail locations, insert the AT&T name into communications and services, and make its 15,000 retail personnel start wearing snazzy AT&T apparel. One thing AT&T won’t tell us about the campaign: how much money its blowing on the transition.

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Have T-Mobile? Your 5G service is about to get much faster
U.S. map illustrating T-Mobile's 5G Ultra Capacity network expansion.

T-Mobile’s 5G network already offers unmatched 5G speeds and coverage throughout the U.S., with 98% of the population covered by some flavor of T-Mobile’s 5G and more than 90% benefiting from its higher-speed 5G Ultra Capacity (5G UC) network.

That translates to the “Uncarrier” taking first place in 5G performance in 46 U.S. states. However, T-Mobile isn’t content to sit at 90% coverage. It’s been working steadily to increase the footprint of its 5G UC network to reach even further, and is bringing those top speeds to areas previously served only by its lower-frequency 5G Extended Range network.
A ‘Massive 5G Boost’

Read more
I’ve seen the future of smartphones, and it’s astonishing
The T Phone running a demo of Brain.ai.

I’ve seen a future where you may never need apps or to unlock your phone at all, yet still get everything you want done, plus more, and even faster than you can now. At MWC 2024, Deutsche Telekom and Brain Technologies showed off the concept of an appless phone, where actions we normally perform using them are instead handled by an AI concierge that lives on the device’s lock screen.

The week before the show, I spoke to Brain's founder and CEO Jerry Yue and had an in-depth demonstration of what Brain.ai can really do, and what I saw had me eagerly ready and waiting to start deleting apps from my phone.
Applets on the fly
Jerry Yue, Founder and CEO of Brain Technologies Brain Technologies

Read more
Were you affected by the AT&T outage? You may get some free money
A photo of the AT&T logo on a building.

Last Thursday was a bad day for AT&T. Early in the morning on February 22, AT&T's network went down for thousands of people across the U.S.. The network was offline for hours and outage reports on Down Detector peaked at nearly 75,000. It was eventually fixed, but the damage was still done. Thankfully, if you were among the many people impacted by the outage, we have some good news for you.

On February 24, AT&T published a page on its website called "Making it right." In short, if your AT&T service was down and you were affected by it, you're getting a discount on your next bill. The AT&T page reads as follows:

Read more