AT&T

Abbreviation for American Telephone and Telegraph, US telecommunications company that owns four out of five telephones in the USA. It was founded in 1877 by the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, as the Bell Telephone Company; it took its present name in 1899.

Plans to split the company into three separate divisions were announced in 1995. In 1996 Lucent Technologies, a systems and equipment company, was split from the parent company, followed by NCR, a computer company, in 1997, while the new AT&T began to impose itself as an integrated voice and data communications company, operating local telephone services and launching an Internet service, WorldNet, through which, from February 1996, the company offered its customers free access to the Internet. By 1999, the company had merged with the second largest cable company in the USA, TCI, which was renamed AT&T Broadband and Internet Services, and had joined in a venture with the major telephone company in the UK, BT, to combine the two company's international operations in a scheme called Concert. In 2000, AT&T announced that it will divide into four companies by 2002, creating separate companies for consumers, businesses, cable television, and wireless systems.

The research wing of Bell Laboratories, which was split between AT&T and Lucent Technologies in 1996, has averaged a patent a day for 70 years, and has included seven Nobel prizewinners amongst its researchers.