AT&T
American multinational conglomerate
AT&T Inc., an abbreviation of its predecessor's original name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications company headquartered at the Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. AT&T is the world's third-largest telecommunications company by revenue, the third-largest wireless carrier in the United States behind T-Mobile and Verizon, and the nation's largest fiber internet provider. On the New York Stock Exchange, AT&T trades under the ticker symbol "T," and has a market capitalization of $186.83 billion. On the Fortune 500 (2025) AT&T ranked 37th among the largest American businesses and reported revenues of $125.6 billion last year.
AT&T has over 240 million subscribers worldwide, and its operations are split into two main segments: Communications, which offers wireless services, broadband options, and business solutions, along with Latin America, which provides wireless networking in Mexico. Even after spinning off DirecTV, AT&T still offers bundling deals with it. While AT&T traces its history to the original company founded in 1885, the modern version began on January 1, 1984, as Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC Communications) after the Bell System breakup. The original AT&T was created by American Bell Telephone on March 5, 1885, as a long-distance subsidiary, and later merged with its corporate parent in 1889. Over time, AT&T developed a natural monopoly in telephony, dominating telecommunications for much of the 20th century and earning the nickname "Ma Bell".
The U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T under the Sherman Antitrust Act, arguing it held unfair advantages over other telecom companies through the Bell System.
The public source identifies “AT&T” as american multinational conglomerate. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around American, multinational and conglomerate.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q35476. VIAF identifies the subject as 146516488. The Library of Congress control number is no97054125. 3 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 1885, 1984 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “AT&T” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.