ony Partnerships On the domestic side, TCI's wholly owned cable systems reached only about IO percent of AT&T's residential customers. And because of the way the cable industry had grown, TCI's systems were scattered across the country, rarely serving an entire city. Dallas, for example, was served at that time by five different cable systems, only one of which was owned by TCI. Leo Hindery was completing a massive "cluster- ing" program, trading, selling, and buying properties until about 80 percent of TCI's systems would be within twenty metropolitan areas. To this, Armstrong added another objective even before Hindery was officially on the payroll: forge telephony partnerships with other cable companies. Hindery and Malone had held out the prospect that once AT&T was a member of the club, reaching deals with other cable companies would be easier than it had been when Armstrong called on the indus- try leaders in Atlanta just months before. Besides, if anyone had dem- onstrated deal-making prowess, it was Hindery. By December 1998, he had lined up agreements with five of the "affiliates" in which TCI held a minority interest. But the real precedent-setting deal, one with the next largest cable company, Time Warner, continued to elude him. Say Good-Bye to the Rah-Rah Brother- and Sisterhood 185 The biggest stumbling block to an agreement proved to be the kind of technical issue that most frustrated Hindery-how much band- width Time Warner would agree to turn over to the joint venture for telephone service. He had been in the cable business long enough to know the importance of bandwidth-it is the equivalent of floor space in a high rise. What he couldn't understand was why AT&T's negotia- tors wanted more than 128,000 kilobits, which was enough for at least four telephone lines into every house, and with new technology poten- tially even more. For their part, AT&T's bargainers did not want to be relegated to the old world of plain old telephone service (POTS). What if someone came up with practical video telepho