What I don't understand is that I thought the old AT&T cellular
> carrier didn't have such a great reputation, but Cingular did.
Right. AT&T spun off quite a lot of "we don't care, we don't have to" into ATTWS.
Given that, and as you say all the branding work, I don't see how
> renaming Cingular into "at&t" makes sense.
Seems pretty stupid to me, too. I expect they think there will long term benefits in giving the whole company the same name.
While we're on the subject, after divesture whatever happened to Bell
> Canada and Cincinnatti Bell, of which I believe AT&T didn't own very > much.
It's been a long time since AT&T owned any of Bell Canada. It's quite healthy, and remains the dominant telco in eastern Canada. Their holding comapny BCE has bought a variety of other stuff, notably the Globe and Mail which is Canada's largest newspaper.
After unhooking itself from AT&T, Cinci Bell made the same mistake as Qwest, diving into the long distance market and calling itself Broadwing, and learned the same lesson as Qwest, there's only a financial black hole there. They spat Broadwing back out and are now back to being a profitable regional ILEC with all the usual services including mobile telephony and DSL.
R's,
John