Sales Erosion Wears Thin at SBC, AT&T

Remember the Alamo

Meanwhile, SBC posted results that were notable more for the one statistic the company failed to furnish in its third-quarter press release than for the many that it offered up.

If the third quarter's declines in earnings and revenue were expected and therefore largely discounted by investors, it's clear that the company's loss of local access lines continues to rankle. As a matter of fact, SBC's release didn't even note how many access lines it had lost in the latest quarter -- only the 55 million it had in total.

But it provided an abundance of other metrics. SBC's release mentions a 365,000-unit rise in digital subscriber lines and a 1.7 million long-distance-line gain. Yet specifics were more difficult to locate on its declining core local phone business.

Though the San Antonio phone giant was able to slow the shrinking of its total line count, the company appears to have lost 835,000 lines, or 1.5% of its total in the third quarter. And that number was arrived at only by adding regional subtotals from SBC's earnings Web cast slide presentation.