AT&T Internet Services

Last updated
Currently from AT&T
Type of site
Web Portal
Owner AT&T
URL https://currently.att.yahoo.com/
Launched1996;26 years ago (1996)

Currently from AT&T (previously AT&T Internet Services and SBC Internet Services) is a trade name for several affiliated companies.

Contents

Companies

The following companies provide AT&T Internet services:

BellSouth Telecommunications (bellsouth.net) also provides AT&T FastAccess Internet service in the Southeast United States. AT&T has now assigned the att.net domain and AT&T Yahoo! Internet service in the AT&T Southeast (BellSouth) Region.

New e-mail addresses from these companies typically end in "att.net", with older addresses retaining the domains assigned to them by e-mail services provided by Maillennium, a system developed by AT&T Labs.

att.net

The att.net portal has customizable web-based content including news, sports, weather, entertainment, email, applications, products and services. AT&T created att.net as a web portal in 1995 in support of AT&T Worldnet, a dial-up Internet access service. Following the acquisition [3] of AT&T by SBC Communications, and the subsequent acquisition of BellSouth, the purpose of the att.net portal widened: it was made to serve as the portal not only for Worldnet customers, but also for customers of BellSouth Dial and BellSouth DSL, as well as for all AT&T ISP customers in the SBC territory who had not elected to use the SBC Yahoo! portal. In an effort to make the most of the relationship with Yahoo! and to simplify its offerings, AT&T determined that it would close the historical, internally developed portal at att.net. All AT&T ISP customers were provisioned with AT&T-branded accounts on the Yahoo! portal and with Yahoo! premium-level e-mail accounts, and att.net became the web address for this unified portal.

Conversion to AT&T Internet Services

On January 30, 2008, AT&T announced that it would end a longtime partnership with Google for my.att.net and instead would begin to offer services provided by Yahoo! beginning in the second quarter of 2008 for all AT&T Internet Services customers. [4] AT&T internet customers in the legacy SBC region of AT&T were already on the AT&T Yahoo! service. On April 2, 2008, the new att.net powered by Yahoo! was launched. [5] AT&T began migrating customers off the old Worldnet portal and onto the Powered by Yahoo! portal in December 2008, and the final migrations were completed in May 2010.

In 2010, AT&T announced the migration of all former Worldnet-based accounts to AT&T Dial, AT&T High Speed Internet, AT&T Pre-Paid Internet or a standalone portal or e-mail service.[ citation needed ] Between April 5 and April 15, 2010, all WorldNet accounts that had not been migrated were suspended.

On May 4, 2016, AT&T announced that it had entered into a new contract with Synacor for the company to take over the majority of its in-house internet services. AT&T stated that Yahoo would still provide email services for its customers, but effective June 30, 2017, AT&T e-mail accounts will no longer automatically function as Yahoo accounts. [6] [7]

Service

Usage caps

On May 2, 2011, all DSL customers of AT&T became subject to a monthly use cap of 150GB. The company began sending users notice of the change in Terms of Service on March 18, 2011. The plan for charging when a user exceeds the limit is to begin doing so if the account exceeds the limit three times over the life of the account, and the charge will be $10 for every 50GB of overuse for DSL users. [8]

DSL phaseout

In October 2020, the company stopped selling new DSL connections, saying that "We’re beginning to phase out outdated services like DSL ..." As of mid-2020, the company had about 650,000 total DSL connections. [9] It continues to sell its hybrid-fiber service, sold as “AT&T Internet,” which combines fiber trunk lines with DSL last-mile connections for faster speeds. [9]

Logos

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Regional Bell Operating Company</span> U.S. regional telephone companies created by 1984 AT&T breakup

The Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) are the result of United States v. AT&T, the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust suit against the former American Telephone & Telegraph Company. On January 8, 1982, AT&T Corp. settled the suit and agreed to divest its local exchange service operating companies. Effective January 1, 1984, AT&T Corp.'s local operations were split into seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies known as the Baby Bells.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet service provider</span> Organization that provides access to the Internet

An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.

An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider, a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, an official government site, social media, a wiki, or a Usenet newsgroup.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BellSouth</span> American telecommunications company

BellSouth, LLC was an American telecommunications holding company based in Atlanta, Georgia. BellSouth was one of the seven original Regional Bell Operating Companies after the U.S. Department of Justice forced the American Telephone & Telegraph Company to divest itself of its regional telephone companies on January 1, 1984.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prodigy (online service)</span> Online service that operated from 1984 to 2001

Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.

Freeserve was a British Internet service provider, which was founded in 1998. At its height, the company became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index, before merging into the Wanadoo group in 2000. It then became a subsidiary of France Telecom, who owned a controlling interest in Wanadoo. Wanadoo rebranded over time and eventually became Orange Home UK.

Africa Online Holding Ltd., sometimes abbreviated to AFOL, is the largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Africa. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, it offers Internet access and operates in ten African countries, including Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Namibia, Eswatini, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Services provided by Africa Online include dial-up Internet access, leased line services, e-mail accounts, VSAT connectivity, DSL, WAN and VPN for private and business customers. In 2007 it has become a subsidiary of Telkom South Africa.

A naked DSL, also known as standalone or dry loop DSL, is a digital subscriber line (DSL) without a PSTN service — or the associated dial tone. In other words, only a standalone DSL Internet service is provided on the local loop.

WorldWide Access, also known as WWA, was an Internet Service Provider based in Chicago, Illinois. WorldWide Access was the service name of the company, which was called Computing Engineers, Inc.

SORBS is a list of e-mail servers suspected of sending or relaying spam. It has been augmented with complementary lists that include various other classes of hosts, allowing for customized email rejection by its users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Breakup of the Bell System</span> 1982 U.S. government action to end AT&T Corps monopoly over telephone services

The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by an agreed consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided local telephone service in the United States. This effectively took the monopoly that was the Bell System and split it into entirely separate companies that would continue to provide telephone service. AT&T would continue to be a provider of long-distance service, while the now-independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), nicknamed the "Baby Bells", would provide local service, and would no longer be directly supplied with equipment from AT&T subsidiary Western Electric.

Xtra was a brand used by New Zealand telecommunications provider Spark for its Internet service provider subsidiary from 1996 to 2008. At its inception, Xtra provided only dial-up Internet access, but began providing ADSL service in 1999.

United Online, Inc. was an independent public company formed by the 2001 merger of NetZero and Juno Online Services. It is currently a subsidiary of investment bank B. Riley Financial. The company's range of products and services has evolved significantly since its inception as a provider of dial-up Internet access. This has been aided by a series of acquisitions that have included Classmates Online (2004), MyPoints (2006), and FTD Group, Inc. (2008), the latter of which was spun off as its own company in 2013. United Online is headquartered in Woodland Hills, California, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Speakeasy (ISP)</span> Defunct internet service provider

Speakeasy, Inc. was a broadband internet service provider and voice over IP carrier based in Seattle, Washington, United States. Their terms of service described liberal usage policies for home users allowing subscribers to run any number of servers and allowing them to resell their connectivity to others through a service called "NetShare". They received press coverage for their support of Linux and BSD-derivative operating systems, and were reportedly the first provider to offer a customized version of Mozilla Firefox to customers, in January 2005. The company was acquired by MegaPath Corporation in 2010. MegaPath in turn was acquired by Fusion Connect, which retired the Speakeasy brand.

SBC Long Distance LLC is a long-distance telephone company owned by AT&T that does business as AT&T Long Distance. SBC Long Distance competes with other long-distance providers who provide service within some of the Bell Operating Company service boundaries of AT&T. SBC Long Distance is a separate subsidiary than AT&T Communications, the incumbent long-distance carrier for most of the country acquired in the SBC merger with AT&T.

DNS hijacking, DNS poisoning, or DNS redirection is the practice of subverting the resolution of Domain Name System (DNS) queries. This can be achieved by malware that overrides a computer's TCP/IP configuration to point at a rogue DNS server under the control of an attacker, or through modifying the behaviour of a trusted DNS server so that it does not comply with internet standards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AT&T</span> American multinational telecommunications holding company

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile telephone services in the U.S. As of 2022, AT&T was ranked 13th on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations, with revenues of $168.8 billion.

EarthLink is an American Internet service provider.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MSN Dial-up</span> Internet service provide operated by Microsoft

MSN Dial-up is an Internet service provider operated by Microsoft in the United States and formerly also in several other countries. Originally named The Microsoft Network, it debuted as a proprietary online service on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of Windows 95. In 1996 and 1997, a revised web-based version of the ISP was an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frontier Communications of Connecticut</span>

The Southern New England Telephone Company, doing business as Frontier Communications of Connecticut, is a local exchange carrier owned by Frontier Communications.

References

  1. "AT&T". Archived from the original on 2007-09-25. Retrieved 2017-12-28.
  2. Connecticut Secretary of State
  3. "SBC completes purchase of AT&T".
  4. AT&T and Yahoo! enter into new strategic alliance [ permanent dead link ]
  5. AT&T Internet Service - FAQs Archived January 27, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  6. Kelly, Heather (2016-05-04). "Yahoo loses key AT&T business". CNNMoney. Retrieved 2017-06-26.
  7. Shieber, Jonathan. "Update: As Yahoo's partnership with AT&T unwinds, users need to switch email addresses". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-06-26.
  8. Bode, Karl (13 March 2011). "AT&T To Impose Caps, Overages". DSLReports. Archived from the original on 3 May 2011. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
  9. 1 2 Pegoraro, Rob (October 3, 2020). "AT&T shelving DSL may leave hundreds of thousands hanging by a phone line". USA TODAY. Retrieved 2020-12-31.