This article printed from
Broadband Week, located at
www.broadbandweek.com.
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SBC, Yahoo! Team For DSL By Susan Rush SBC Communications Inc. enlists Yahoo! Inc. as its ally in the broadband content delivery war. The duo will work together to deliver DSL services. The deal, which marks Yahoo!'s first foray into the DSL market, calls for the two companies to market a co-branded DSL access service to customers in SBC's 13-state-local-service region and a dial-up service nationwide. "The winner of the broadband war will be the company that delivers the best broadband-powered content, communication services and features to its customers," says James Kahan, SBC's senior executive vice president of corporate development. "As part of the agreement, we will jointly develop and deliver those next-generation broadband powered services," said SBC CEO Ed Whitacre in a conference call. "Together we will make the promise of online games, video-on-demand, personal video conferencing and other broadband services a reality to our customers." Subscribers to SBC's DSL service will receive a customized version of Yahoo! that includes a package of bundled premium services, including Unified Messaging -- a tool designed to enable users to check, store, manage and reply to voicemail, faxes and e-mail received from multiple sources through an interface on their start/home page. Yahoo! will receive monthly per-subscriber payments from SBC, while SBC will receive a share of Yahoo!'s non-subscriber revenue on advertising, e-commerce and broadband-enabled features and services on the portal. As part of the agreement, Yahoo! will market DSL as its preferred broadband solution, which in turn may offset SBC's decision to slow the buildout of its DSL initiative "Project Pronto." When the Baby Bell reported its third-quarter results last month, Whitacre said economic and regulatory concerns were causing SBC to slow down its digital subscriber line initiative, cut capital expenditures by 20 percent, slash jobs and pass on upgrades in secondary markets. Until the announcement, SBC had been the champion of the DSL deployment cause. SBC may be teaming with Yahoo! in an attempt to put itself on a level playing field with the likes of AOL Time Warner Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Both companies own a great deal of online content and have been taking steps to be competitive in the broadband service arena. The SBC/Yahoo! service is slated to launch in mid-2002.
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