percent of Americans who sub- scribed to cable TV, 33 percent of those taking digital cable, 3I percent Tough Calls of those with high-speed Internet access, and 67 percent of those with cable telephony. From that moment until the deal closed nearly a year later, Brian Roberts called Noski every few weeks and asked, "How am I doing?" He had kept his word. Credibility Breaks All Ties One should not interpret the length of the board meeting as suggest- ing that the directors were struggling with a decision. In fact, most of them had made up their minds on one issue (selling) weeks before. At the September 200I meeting that kicked off the official bidding process for AT&T Broadband, Armstrong had made one last pitch to stay the course and spin off the cable business intact. Standing at an easel pad, he drew columns of numbers showing how a sale could be avoided if some smaller cable systems were sold off and minority in- terests were turned into cash. Among those minority holdings, the biggest was Time Warner En- tertainment. But some of the directors had come to the conclusion that as long as AOL Time Warner thought AT&T needed a deal, it would press for terms that no one could agree to. A former Time Warner insider once warned one of AT&T's negotiators, "The old Time Warner entered every negotiation intending to come out on top, but AOL goes into negotiations intending to come out with their foot on your throat." (In fact, it was only after AOL Time Warner suffered its own reversals, culminating in Levin's resignation, that Comcast was able to negotiate its exit from TWE.) Thinking that Armstrong's assumptions were a little optimistic, Noski picked up a marker and added another, less upbeat column of numbers to the easel pad. Months after I left AT&T, one of its direc- tors told me that this was a turning point for the board. He said that when the board went into executive session, one of the directors told the others, "Noski looks worried." Saving AT&T To Noski, AT&T's restructuring was not simply about "enhancin