atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information SBC Buying AT&T...what's everyone think?

Thornhill hit the nail on the head! Soon "everything" will be One company. can you imaging that? and any competition will be bought out. Even the government will be a sub-division of XYZ company. Lets start a pool on what Company will win the Monopoly game. Microsoft perhaps? Maybe Blockbuster. Imagine buying a car made by AOL/Time Warner! Sky's the limit.

When the dust settles........it will be CISCO...

My bet is on Microsoft or Wal-Mart.

Yeah, Cisco...then we will get about 1/3 of our calls dropped and outages due to a server malfunctioning....bummer.

I hear so many people talking about getting burned by CISCO, yet I see their switches all over the joint.

Whatz up?

What are the problems that people run into with CISCO products?

They have BY FAR the best marketing I have ever seen. They cover their tracks like no other company I have ever seen on their telephone systems. You have to look REALLY hard and google to find bad things beacause they purposely spam the hell outa the search engines. It can do really cool things, but it lacks some basic PBX functionality while having bells and whistles that cost businesses money because they take away from th eemployees work time. It's the type of system that will nickle and dime you. Want to add MOH..OH that wasn't on your RFP..that'll just be an additional server $$$$ ching ching...and it goes on and on. Off my soapbox now.

so the problems from CISCO are with their phone systems?

Cause their network stuff is SOLID...

I thought their IP Phone stuff was top rated..

Actually their routers are top notch..although there are other companies that make better units IMHO..like adtran and do alot more. Ask some customers sometime about it. City of Dallas being one and see how many heads rolled and ONLY when IBM stepped in they got it working. Their ROI was millions in the negetive. Like I said you have to see some of the horror stories I have walked into. Let's put it this way, they can get away with alot because they simply use the word server, meaning computer. You know how that double standard goes.

I'd hope that SBC could fire all of AT&T's customer support staff and re-hire completely.

AT&T customer support is counter-productive and is completely non-user friendly. It can take a full morning to get a human being online.

All the best to SBC. I hope they make drastic, mcuh needed changes.

In todays paper it looks like Verizon is trying to buy MCI, looking to beat out Quest. See not long, One Company.