By John Murawski
AT&T's new president for North Carolina operations will push to start selling the company's new television service in the state this year.
AT&T took over BellSouth last month, sealing the largest merger in telecommunications history and creating a company spanning 22 states that's poised to dominate the market for phone, TV and other services.
In an interview Wednesday with editors and reporters at The News & Observer, Cynthia Marshall, incoming chief for AT&T in North Carolina, said her goal is to make television service in the state a priority in AT&T's 2007 corporate plans.
"I want to put North Carolina high on the map" within the company, she said. "This is a powerful state. I really do think this is where the action is."
AT&T's television programming, available on a limited basis in California and Texas, would be the state's first network-based-- not satellite-based -- TV service offered by a telephone company since lawmakers lifted franchising restrictions last year. AT&T's entry into television could help the company reclaim customers lost to cable TV rivals that sell Internet and phone service.
AT&T expects to begin phasing out the venerable BellSouth name -- replacing it with AT&T -- within months, Marshall said. The company also will push to relax the state's decades-old regulation of telephone service prices.
She said rivals have reason to be nervous as AT&T moves to win customers. AT&T's television programming would offer consumers a new choice and potentially hold down prices.
"AT&T is a behemoth in terms of its size and scale," said Randall Fraser, Time Warner Cable's vice president of government affairs in Raleigh. "They have significant resources that they can redeploy. They are a very substantial competitor."
However, Rob Thompson, public interest advocate with N.C. Public Interest Research Group, suggested that AT&T could limit its TV offerings to affluent neighborhoods, leaving most people without improved options for TV service.
Marshall, 47, replaced Krista Tillman as president of AT&T's North Carolina operations two weeks ago. Marshall, who was raised in the San Francisco Bay area and built her corporate career in California, said she received a surprise call from AT&T brass Dec. 29.
They told her to be on a plane to AT&T's corporate headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, on New Year's Day. There, she learned that she had been picked to run the company's newly combined BellSouth, Cingular Wireless and AT&T services under the AT&T banner in North Carolina. Before then, Marshall had visited North Carolina only once, for a friend's wedding about nine years ago, she said.
Marshall is eager to demonstrate that she's adopting North Carolina as her home. She will keep offices in Raleigh and Charlotte and expects to buy a house in the Triangle with her husband, a stay-at-home father to the couple's adopted children, 14 and 12. She talks up her children's newfound passion for Tar Heel basketball -- despite her allegiance to her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley.
"I'm not a Californian just passing through here," she said. "I'm not moving my kids across the country to be here for a minute."
AT&T in North Carolina is an operation of 8,000 employees statewide, including 3,000 from Cingular. Though the company has promised cost-cutting after the merger, Marshall said AT&T's employment in the state "should be steady."
She has been through mergers before and led the effort to win regulatory approval for AT&T's merger with SBC two years ago.
Marshall began her career with Pacific Bell in 1981 and stayed with the company through takeovers and four corporate name changes.
"I hope that's an advantage, that I can get to the right people quickly and make things happen," she said of her connections within AT&T.
Marshall's other corporate goal mirrors a strategy adopted by BellSouth, which has asked the state Utilities Commission to allow the company to set phone service prices as it pleases without hearings or oversight. The commission put the request on hold during the pending merger last year, but AT&T plans to resume the push with regulatory staff soon.
Marshall said she agrees with the contention made repeatedly by BellSouth and other local phone companies: that local phone rates have been artificially underpriced under a regulatory model rendered obsolete by competition.
However, she suggested that state regulators should continue to have a role in monitoring service quality of basic phone service.
" 'Deregulation' is a word I don't care for," she said. "I do believe there is a role for consumer protections."
