On June 24, 1998, AT&T, the nation's largest provider of telephone service, announced a plan to buy TCI, second to Time Warner among cable operators with 13 million customers, for $32 billion in stock and $16 billion in assumed debt. This marked the first major merger between phone and cable since deregulation. The new company, to be called AT&T Consumer Services, planned to "significantly accelerate" efforts to offer digital telephone, data and video services as the companies combined the long distance, wireless and dial-up Internet service of AT&T with the cable, high-speed Internet and telecommunications services of TCI. For the first time, AT&T would be able to offer local telephone service. To do this, the company could have bought a Baby bell such as SBC Communications (which purchased AT&T in 2005 and took the AT&T name), but this would have meant regulatory problems. Liberty Media stockholders would receive separate tracking stock.