h With the BT joint venture and the acquisition of TCI, Armstrong had extended AT&T's reach in two directions. The BT joint venture would enable AT&T to follow its multinational customers around the world and, eventually, could give it a beachhead in non-U.S. markets that were slowly opening to competition. The TCI acquisition would give AT&T a direct link to many of its residential customers for the first time in fifteen years. And this connection would not be over poky, narrowband copper wires but over the high-speed, broadband me- dium of fiber-optic and coaxial cables. But with all that, Armstrong knew that AT&T's reach still fell short of its grasp. AT&T's joint venture with BT, soon to be known by the same name as BT's previous partnership with MCI, Concert, began life with impressive assets under the seas and in the gateway cities of many countries. But its distribution beyond those beachheads was less im- Tough Calls pressive-a patchwork of minority holdings and loose alliances. And while it had about 300,000 miles of undersea cable, little of that cable was connected to high-speed data switches. AT&T had sought to ad- dress this gap by purchasing the IBM Global Network, but BT backed out of participating in the acquisition at the last minute. Some of the European network operators in which BT had invested actually com- peted with Concert in their local markets. Furthermore, both AT&T and BT had offshore operations that were outside the scope of their joint venture. AT&T Solutions was a fast- growing systems integration and outsourcing division with 5,000 em- ployees outside the United States. BT had an equivalent organization with people around the world. Both units were led by executives with the outsized egos and brash charm of successful Veg-o-matic sales- men. The BT joint venture was less a marriage than a dysfunctional ménage a trois in which all three parties (AT&T, BT, and Concert) gos- sip and complain about the others when they are out of earshot and have other affairs on the side. Cable Teleph