Actually, I don't think you are being pedantic. The lineage is really important/interesting. Here, in the Bay Area, the majority of the LEC lines belonged to

Actually, I don't think you are being pedantic. The lineage is really important/interesting. Here, in the Bay Area, the majority of the LEC lines belonged to Pacific Bell (You can almost always tell who the "real" company is by looking at the cable-vaults, the names of the holding company is written in engraved/raised metal that will last for 100+ years). The SF Giants Stadium was born as "PacBell Park" Somewhere around 1997/1998, SBC Acquired all of Pacific Bell - so 100% of the PacBell LEC lines became SBC lines. Your Phone Bill now read "SBC", and a few years later, PacBell Park became SBC Park. Then, in 2005, SBC acquired AT&T, and, because AT&T had a stronger global brand, they changed their name to be "AT&T", even though AT&T was now just one component of the larger SBC. What's really confusing, is somewhere around 2003/2004, LEC competition was deregulated a bit, and the 2003 AT&T starting offering Local Phone services in the Bay area. So, you ran into scenarios where you would get a visit from both AT&T and SBC trying to sell you local phone services. I actually purchased a pretty good sized Long Distance/Data/LEC package from AT&T for around $15K MRC for our office buildings in Sunnyvale. The reason this is confusing, is that when SBC acquired AT&T, you now had two classes of AT&T customers, those with SBC legacy facilities, and those with AT&T legacy facilities. For about 5 years after the acquisition, every telecom consultant I dealt with avoided the confusion (for some definition of avoid, and confusion) - by continuing to refer to anyone getting their services from 2003 SBC, as "SBC Customers", even though, for the last several years, their phone bill read "AT&T". So, ironically, for some customers in the Bay Area, AT&T lines actually are AT&T lines, but for most customers, they are SBC/Pacific Bell lines.