munications industry, the company sold its cellular and cable businesses to focus on voice and data communications. After announcing a major business reshuffle in 2000, the company spun off AT&T Wireless in 2001. A year later, AT&T Broadband was sold to cable provider Comcast. To top it all off, the company announced in 2004 that it would stop pouring money into marketing the one service that was the backbone of its identity - residential service, particularly long-distance. But there's plenty left for AT&T to sell to consumers and small businesses alike: local and long-distance telephone plans, DSL or dial-up Internet service. It also offers data, web hosting, virtual private network (VPN) management, video conferencing and other services for large-scale operations like governments, wholesalers and other big businesses. It's services like these that will likely be the wave of the future for one of the oldest telephone companies in the country. Telegraphic traffic The history of AT&T is essentially the history of the telephone itself. After winning patents for his "talking telegraph" invention, Alexander Graham Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company with Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, two financiers who had bankrolled Bell's research. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporated in 1885 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Bell Telephone and began to build the first long-distance phone network. By 1915, the network spanned the continent from New York to San Francisco. When Bell's patents expired, thousands of new telephone companies sprang up. While the result was massive growth in the availability of phone service, it also created a jumbled mess of incompatible networks. In response, AT&T was granted a legal monopoly on domestic long-distance service in exchange for agreeing to connect the various local phone companies to its network and divesting itself of the Western Union telegraph company. The Bell System, as it came to be known, was successful in eventually wiring the country; by the midd