News In Brief

AT&T divestiture ends phone service monopoly

American Telephone & Telegraph, the world's largest private company, was formaly broken up Jan. 1 into eight separate units, ending AT&T's 107-year monopoly of the nation's phone system.

The new companies consist of a smaller AT&T and seven regional holding companies formed from the 22 operating firms that acutally provie local phone service, AT&T's $153 billion holdings including plant, equipment, and more than 180 million telephones, were reshuffled among the eight companies, as were nearly 1 million workers.