At Amp

AT&T Inc., Electronic Data Systems Corp. and 27 other companies won a 10-year contract valued at $50 billion to provide government departments with computer services. The companies have the right to bid on contracts to offer services such as software development, the General Services Administration said. The organization designed the contract so that agencies such as the Defense Department could buy technology more swiftly.

Pearl Jam is alarmed that an AT&T concert website pulled the plug on their stage politics, but an official with the communications giant called the incident "a major, major mistake" that runs counter to the company's policy. The Seattle rock band closed the three-day Lollapolooza Festival in Chicago last weekend, with AT&T's Blue Room handling the live webcast.

Oops, they did it before. A day after AT&T apologized to Pearl Jam, Lollapalooza organizers and music fans for deleting a snippet of the band's performance last weekend in Chicago during which Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush, the company offered up another mea culpa Friday for tinkering with other performers' webcasts.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Friday that AT&T Corp. must credit women retirees with work time they lost during maternity leaves taken before the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act was enacted three decades ago. In an 11-4 decision, the U.S.

The iPhone has given its owners a bad case of information overload. When his first iPhone bill from AT&T Inc. arrived in the mail, Dan Sokol got nervous. More than 30 pages long, it not only itemized every call the Silicon Valley consultant made in July but also recorded every time he used the Internet or sent e-mail. "This is probably the same kind of stuff the National Security Agency gets on suspected terrorists," Sokol said. He is not alone. Some bills for Apple Inc.'

It's the end of time, at least as far as AT&T is concerned. The brief note in customers' bills hardly does justice to the momentousness of the decision. "Service withdrawal," it blandly declares. "Effective September 2007, Time of Day information service will be discontinued." What that means is that people throughout Southern California will no longer be able to call 853-1212 to hear a woman's recorded voice state that "at the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be . . ."

AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. can each merge their local and long-distance telephone operations with fewer government restrictions than some rivals wanted, U.S. regulators said. The Federal Communications Commission agreed to exempt the two biggest U.S. phone companies from price caps and other so-called dominant-carrier rules on long-distance service. Qwest Communications International Inc. won the same type of exemption in February.

It may be something of a teenage nightmare: possible limits on wireless phone calls, curbs on text messages and restrictions on downloads -- all at a parent's fingertips. AT&T Inc., the nation's largest wireless carrier, will launch a service today giving parents that kind of wide-ranging control on almost all of its 63.7 million subscriber lines.

Cellphone service providers are famous for their swagger. Sprint brags that it has "the fastest and largest national mobile broadband network," and Verizon proclaims its network is "America's most reliable." AT&T's boast was about "fewest dropped calls" -- until recently. Now, it's about "more bars in more places." Why did AT&T ditch its long-running advertising campaign? A spokesman for the wireless unit of AT&T Inc.

AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp., the biggest U.S. wireless carriers, were sued by NTP Inc. over patent infringement claims similar to those it made against Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device. Closely held NTP, a technology-licensing company based in Virginia, claims that the carriers are violating eight patents for e-mail services. NTP wants royalties based on sales of phones, personal digital assistants and other e-mail devices.