Cingular Wireless LLC

Cingular Wireless LLC was the U.S. wireless arm formed in April 2000 as a joint venture of SBC Communications (60%) and BellSouth (40%), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It consolidated more than 100 regional Bell wireless operations. SBC acquired AT&T Corp. in 2005 and took the AT&T Inc. name; AT&T then acquired BellSouth on December 29, 2006, giving it 100% of Cingular. The Delaware entity was renamed AT&T Mobility LLC on January 8, 2007, and the Cingular brand was retired that year, ahead of the first iPhone launch. The successor, AT&T Mobility LLC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), headquartered in Brookhaven, Georgia. Cingular had no standalone ticker; financials were folded into its parents. An Associated Press profile cited 2005 revenue of about $30.6 billion and net income of roughly $333 million; AT&T Mobility reported about 75,000 employees in 2015.

Operations: Cingular sold wireless voice and data service — postpaid plans, prepaid/pay-as-you-go service, nationwide GSM and TDMA networks, retail stores, and handsets. Its October 2004 purchase of AT&T Wireless Services (~$41 billion) made it the largest U.S. carrier with roughly 46 million subscribers, growing to about 62 million by 2007. The successor business reports roughly 109 million subscribers as of 2026.

Litigation posture: This is an operating company, not an NPE. The tracked data shows 2 cases as plaintiff and 2 as defendant, all tied to a single prepaid-wireless patent dispute with Freedom Wireless (a small Phoenix-based patent holder). Cingular's two plaintiff-side cases are declaratory-judgment actions seeking to invalidate Freedom's patents — the inverse of an NPE assertion pattern. It was also a defendant in Freedom's Eastern District of Texas suit (a plaintiff-friendly venue), alongside the earlier District of Massachusetts case against Boston Communications Group.

Notable cases: In the Massachusetts action, Freedom won a reported ~$128 million jury verdict against BCGI with Cingular named a joint infringer; the case settled on appeal for about $87 million. Freedom then sued Cingular in E.D. Tex. in November 2006 (No. 2:06-cv-00505), and Cingular countered with declaratory-judgment suits in the District of Arizona. Technology at issue was prepaid cellular authorization using ANI/DNIS codes.