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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

ATT shareholders have been punished quite a bit by the executives they have chosen.

T-Mobile market cap is $165B, Verizon $152B, and ATT at $106B.

Not that the government punishment should not be worse, but kind of breathtaking how badly managed ATT is.

ATT and Verizon are two of the shittiest corporations in existence. Both carriers raised their prices between $6 and $12 a month back in June. This was an obvious "inflation" corporate pile on. The two biggest carriers raised their rates by the same amount at the same time? Perhaps the Justice Department should be looking at that. It's like Ma Bell never went away.

>"BELLEVUE, Wash. — May 31, 2022 — The Carriers called. They want their greedy reputations back. AGAIN. AT&T is raising its rates, increasing customers’ bills by $6 to $12 per month."[1]

>"Wireless postpaid consumer customers on all metered shared data plans will see a plan rate adjustment charge of $6 per month for a single-line phone account and $12 per month for multi-line phone accounts, effective with their next bill cycle, according to Verizon."[2]

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/news/offers/takes-aim-at-att-and-ve...

[2] https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/verizon-quietly-hike...

Comcast would like a word...

I didn't realize Tmobile exceeded Verizon in market cap. wow. VZ has taken major beating in share price lately because of its high debt load.

Looking at Tmobile's plan, https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans I'm shocked at how low their price is for 3 phonelines. $90 essential plan is all I need. Similar plan on ATT would cost me at least 30%+ more.

Note that for now and up until now, it is widely considered that coverage wise, Verizon > ATT > T-Mobile, and so mobile network pricing still reflects that.

I doubt T-Mobile would be selling its services for less if it had the same coverage Verizon and ATT did, so effectively T-Mobile is selling an inferior product.

Both Verizon and ATT tried to pull off a Comcast and tried to go vertical by acquiring content makers to avoid being just a dumb pipe, but they both failed miserably and ended up with a ton of debt.

ATT failed much worse though. They paid $50B for a satellite TV broadcaster in 2015. It was already obvious that streaming was the future. Either extreme corruption or astounding incompetence.

Verizon has made a number of stupid decisions. Like buying and mismanaging Yahoo to buying and mismanaging Tumblr. Meanwhile TMobile bought Sprint and benefited significantly since it increased their coverage from just GSM to CDMA as well making them the only dual radio technology company in the country.

I interpret this to mean the executives are taking both the customers and the shareholders for a ride. Consequences for them would be good for everyone else.

Executives would be getting paid in stock, which has been falling for 10+ years at a time when everyone else’s skyrocketed. Being a structural monopoly, they should at least be able to keep up with inflation given their customers have little choice.

Is their executive leadership that bad if they're gonna wriggle out of a multimillion dollar fine? Seems like another case of "too hard to unravel" and "not even gonna matter after it exits the headlines"

Yes, when your 10 year market cap graph looks like this:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/T/at-t/market-cap

Compared to your competitors:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VZ/verizon/market-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TMUS/t-mobile-us/m...

Getting away for some tiny corruption in one state with a tiny amount of business relative to losses in tens of billions of dollars is nothing.

Incredibly solid counter. Thanks for linking me/us - interesting reading.

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