&T lost ten customers to Sprint or MCI, it won eight back within six months. Customers who left for a Bell company usually stayed there. AT&T's voice revenue, which had funded its entry into everything from credit cards to computers to wireless and now cable television, had reached an inflection point. It would never grow again. And the company's growth businesses-cable, wireless, and data-would not replace the profits generated by voice services for decades. Meanwhile, those businesses were devouring capital at an alarming rate. Deprecia- tion alone would reduce 2001 earnings by 30 cents a share, and the combined capital requirements of the wireless, cable, and data busi- nesses totaled $15 to $19 billion, depending on whose wish list Noski believed. But what troubled Noski the most was the $65 billion in debt that the company had accumulated in buying its cable properties. Annual interest payments alone were about $4 billion a year, and about half the debt-some $32 billion-would come due in less than a year. It was as if the company's previous CEO, Dan Somers, had bought Me- diaOne with a bank credit card. The company's declining cash flow made it impossible for it to reduce its debt significantly and threatened its credit rating. Noski seriously doubted that the company could con- tinue paying its dividend, at least not at its current level of $3.1 billion a year. Even worse, if the company's debt rating were lowered, it could be forced to negotiate new loans with its major banks, which would undoubtedly attach onerous financial and operational terms to them, further limiting the company's options. Everything boiled down to two numbers: In 200I, the company would probably generate about $22 billion in cash from operations and spend about $23 billion on capital additions, interest, and dividends. And things just got worse from there. According to one estimate, by 2005 AT&T would be spending about $13 billion a year more than it was taking in. The company's deteriorating stock price, which had declined some It's