We had that since the 1980s, after AT&T was found guilty of violating the Sherman anti-trust act, and was broken up. Until then, everything was just AT&T. They were the one. But then they forced out competition and that was a no-no. So, AT&T was relegated to long distance service only, and all the local wireline services were divided into regions across the country (the Regional Bell Operating Companies, RBOCs). Worse, each of them had sub-divided territories they broke up into LATAs (local access transport areas) for wireline call-routing and regional long distance; it was awful madness and terrible. Intra-LATA service was your local RBOC; Inter-LATA service had to dial out to a Long Distance provider, which was only AT&T at the time (until Sprint came into the picture, then later MCI and Worldcom). [My family worked for an RBOC here in the US so I was acutely aware and involved with the ebbs and flows of the businesses.]
This lasted largely through the 1990s until 1994-ish when President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law. The local RBOCs wanted to offer inter-LATA long distance service, but that was AT&T territory. AT&T wanted to get back into wireline service. By this time, Motorola had also begun standing up cellular towers and brought in the first generation mobile wireless service. It was a wave of new innovation, including DSL and the fragments that became DOCSIS for coax cable service, which was strictly a domain of your local cable provider, which was regionalized and heavily regulated. Everybody wanted a piece of wireless, cable, DSL, long distance, and local wireline.
The law stipulated: Ok, AT&T you can have wireline service again if you give up exclusivity to your long distance. RBOCs, you can have long distance service if you give up your intra-LATA long distance exclusivity to a long distance provider. Sprint/MCI, you can have LATA service if you share your long distance. Effectively: everyone compete with everyone and you can all have a piece of the pie. Mobile cellular wireless was excluded, since it was an bundled thing (handsets + wireless + the wired backhaul at the time).
So the "ideal world" existed. What happened? The Telcom Act happened. And the wireline service nearly died overnight, wireless clearly became the way of the future. Then the RBOCs were allowed to re-unite. NyNEX (in New York) merged with BBN and became GTE. GTE bought Bell Atlantic and became Verizon. Southern Bell renamed to BellSouth, and merged with southern-region RBOCs. BellSouth had a strong wireless service of their own that eventually became Cingular Wireless (and partnered with someone else; i forget). SouthWestern Bell merged with Pacific Bell (IIRC) and became SBC. There was a mid-western Bell that merged with another one and became AmeriTech (based in Chicago). Another west-region Bell merged with another and became Qwest. SBC later bought Ameritech and became SBC AmeriTech. Verizon partnered with a foreign company (i forget the name) and offered Verizon Wireless. Verizon Wireless bought Alltel in the southern US (which came out of a few local wireless mergers, i think including US Cellular). SBC AmeriTech eventually merged with/bought Cingular Wireless. Verizon finally bought its own Verizon Wireless back into just Verizon.
Sprint offered Internet service and partnered with Earthlink for wireline dial-up, DSL, and DOCSIS cable service. There were two popular other Internet providers for dial-up, DSL, and cable (Earthlink and MindSpring) but they eventually merged. AOL was super-popular during this time and partnered with Earthlink in some areas, and partnered with the new-but-growing AT&T Cable in other regions. Eventually, Sprint started dying so they broke themselves up big time. They sold the mobile cellular wireless to Nextel, sold the wireline services including DSL to CenturyTel, and kept the commercial Internet and backbone service; CenturyTel bought a few other locally-divested wireline services and became CenturyLink. Nextel eventually quasi-died and renamed itself Sprint Wireless, which is what T-Mobile is buying. I forget what happened to Sprint's Internet backbone service; probably sold off to Worldcom.
What happened to MCI? MCI bought WorldCom, and got caught in accounting fraud and went bankrupt. Verizon bought the remains of MCI WorldCom. AT&T ran into troubles and quietly went bankrupt and died. Yep, AT&T died. SBC AmeriTech quickly bought the remains of AT&T mobile wireless service, divested the wireline phone, long distance, DSL, and cable service off to various places (everybody got a piece of this I think), then bought Cingular Wireless all in one single deal. SBC AmeriTech swapped company names and logos, and renamed itself the new AT&T. And the new CEO dude walked out on stage at Macworld in 2007 with Steve Jobs to unveil the first iPhone and announce the new AT&T Wireless service and partnership with Apple.
Meanwhile, the ashes of local wireline dial-up and DSL were given to new companies like Frontier and CenturyLink. CenturyLink made their business lean and efficient and continued to gobble up the remaining terrestrial services. The media-merger of AOL Time-Warner was a disaster and later AOL was spun back out and now I think it has died and been given away. Time-Warner Telecom was sold to Level3 Telecom. CenturyLink just bought Level3 for terrestrial wired Internet service (residential, commercial, and backbone). Sprint's internet backbone was sold off to somewhere, probably ended up in CenturyLink. CenturyLink also bought up Qwest in the mid-west.
On the cable side, eventually Charter bought Time-Warner Cable and became Specturm. I think Comcast bought the cable service of SBC AmeriTech/AT&T cable service during the big AT&T death deal. Oh, and I used to work for the company that became Windstream datacenter services. Windstream was a local provider that gobbled up a lot of wireline stuff then they bought into the datacenter Internet/hosted business, and screwed up much of that. So they split the hosted/datacenter stuff back out and became TierPoint. Windstream itself continued on to buy up cable, wireline, and local services, much like Frontier. The FCC established a local telecom fund (the USF - universal service fund) to pay for super-rural wireline services, which pays for the likes of Frontier, Windstream, and other tiny local-only services. It's all huge and incestuous at this point.
So the ideal world existed. Now it's largely "AT&T wireless, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Wireless, T-Mobile, CenturyLink, Comcast, Spectrum", and wireline is mostly Frontier, Windstream, and maybe some USF-funded smaller players. Everything else is pretty much just MNVO or partnership/sub-divide of those. There are some smaller others, but they won't last much longer, either. Eventually, sadly, it will all become AT&T and Verizon for mobile wireless; Sprint/T-Mobile won't last for much longer. Wireline will continue to be wasteland of commercial/residential Internet with CenturyLink (only because they bought Level3), Comcast, Spectrum, Frontier(?) but they will eventually unite in some fashion.
I see Frontier and Windstream uniting as Windstream, buying up other wireline remains, then you'll see a three-way battle with Comcast, Spectrum, and the bigger Windstream. Those three will duke it out and become two companies; wireline Internet (fiber, DSL, whatever), and the other one just cable/DOCSIS/fiber. You'll have 2 wireless providers, and 2 terrestrial providers. Welcome to the year 2025.
Have a nice day.
