Cingular says an acquisition of AT&T Wireless would generate $5 billion of savings in strategic synergies--or something like that. Does that include cleaning up problems like this: last week I signed up for the "unlimited mobile-to-mobile" option. Then my voicemail stopped working. The problem was any changes made to any plan that day started a domino effect whereby the voicemail retrieval number was overwritten. Of course!

There's one sure winner in this whole AT&T Wireless saga. That's the systems integration services market. The daunting task of integrating the TDMA and GSM databases of AT&T Wireless with any other company is sure to generate millions of dollars of business and create any number of new programming jobs.