AT&T Wireless: Vodafone hesitant to make call

The sale of AT&T Wireless is likely to continue a consolidation trend already evident in the U.S. While 12 different operators, mostly regional players, accounted for 80 percent of the subscribers at the end of 1988, six large national operators achieved the same 80 percent market penetration by the end of 2003, according to data from the EMC World Cellular Database. EMC is a unit of Informa UK Ltd.