From Stephen Carter

Our new benefits programs—called The CingularEdge—are designed to make your life simpler and to focus on your individual expression. We’ve worked hard to design plans that meet your needs because we want you to be satisfied as a Cingular employee and customer.

The CingularEdge benefits described on this site are effective:

• November 2001, for all former SBC employees; and
• January 2002, for all other employees.

One thing is clear to us—sometimes life is complicated and unpredictable. So we’ve designed great benefits that can help make your life simpler, keep you healthy, help build your financial future, and protect you and your family. We even added fun benefits that allow you to express yourself—like a free wireless phone, an exceptional wireless phone employee rate plan, discounts on wireless phone accessories, Cingular Interactive pagers, and even a discount on the purchase of a home computer.

You’ll notice right off the bat that these are not the same benefits you had in the past. That’s because Cingular is a new company with new goals. You’ll see a few benefits that are familiar to you, but you’ll see many more that are new. We want our employees to have an edge, and we designed the benefits plan with that in mind. We want to help you:

• Express Your Edge With Wireless Concessions and Rate Plans
• Maintain Your Edge With Healthcare Benefits
• Build an Edge With Wealth Accumulation Benefits
• Protect Your Edge With Income Replacement Benefits
• Renew Your Edge With Time-Off Benefits
• Get an Edge by Balancing Your Work and Life
• Sharpen Your Edge With Educational Benefits
• Stay on the Leading Edge With Recognition Programs

We’ve designed a program to meet the needs of both our younger and longer service employees. Your experience and leadership are invaluable to us, and we want to make sure you feel good about all the benefits, including those that you have worked hard to attain. In the end, our goals are to to treat all Cingular employees consistently and to provide you the information you need to make informed decisions.

We’re currently reviewing employee pension account balances. If that review indicates a decrease in your projected pension benefit on moving into the Cingular plan, transition contributions will be provided to maintain a fair and equitable benefit. In addition, retiree health and welfare benefits will be available if you meet certain age and service criteria when you retire.

Pay careful attention to the benefits information you’ll see in the coming weeks and months. By providing lots of opportunities for communication and education, we’ll make sure you’re comfortable with the decisions you’ll be making later on this year.

This site provides a detailed overview of your new benefits as a Cingular employee, and outlines general transition issues affecting most employees. You’ll also get a printed version of this information at home so you can share the benefits information with your family. More transition issues will be addressed in a company specific transition letter scheduled to be mailed to your home in May. And there’s more to come. Check out Tools to Hone Your Edge for a list of the tools we plan to use in the coming months to inform and educate you.

It’s important that we provide a workplace that will make the Cingular experience both rewarding and fun. We want you to be proud and happy to be a part of Cingular. We think that offering Leading Edge Benefits from Cingular is one step toward giving you the CingularEdge.

— Stephen

The Core Elements of Our Promise to You

We want Cingular to be the place you want to work. So we promise you that as our culture evolves it will:

• Enhance individual expression
• Make work and life fun
• Help you grow and develop
• Keep it simple
• Applaud teamwork
• Recognize excellence

We won't lose sight of our promise to you. We know that you’re the key to providing our customers a Cingular experience that separates us from competitors. You give us that competitive edge, and to keep our promise to you, we want to give you an edge as well—the CingularEdge. To do this, we want to create a better environment for you to achieve your goals, both at work and in your personal life. And that’s just it: We want you to have a personal life. That’s why we're making our promise real to you by:

• Embracing leading-edge programs that are simple and valuable to you
• Investing in benefits you've told us you need and value most
• Keeping your benefits flexible and simple to understand
• Going for extras that other companies don't even consider
• Providing you, our customer, various opportunities to “express yourself” and educate yourself about our benefits

We want our benefits to give you an edge in life—The CingularEdge.