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For that to be true, AT&T may have to convince TCI customers that their cable company is no longer the same one many came to hate. "Cable companies come up dead last in terms of the choice that a consumer would make for an integrated provider of communications services," says Berge Ayvazian, executive vice president of the Yankee Group, a Boston consulting firm. "And TCI, among cable operators, is not very highly rated in terms of customer satisfaction, although it has improved over the past couple of years."
Armstrong must still contend with those ornery Baby Bells. Even if all 33 million households in neighborhoods that TCI serves were to buy AT&T local service, the company would remain shut out of two-thirds of the country's homes. Armstrong hopes to make inroads with a so-called fixed wireless system that AT&T is developing to deliver household service through cellular technology. But in the end, he acknowledges, as many as 25% of U.S. homes will remain beyond AT&T's reach--unless it can strike deals with the Bells and other local phone companies.
Yet that hardly fazes this hard-charging chopper rider, who says of his quest to rebuild AT&T, "We've just begun to assemble the components." The giant that almost slept through the '90s has awakened in time to make a grab for control of the digital home.
--With reporting by David Bjerklie and Jane Van Tassel/New York, Richard Woodbury/Denver and Adam Zagorin/Washington