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Comment by ksey3 | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. I hope it grows in scope cuz AT&T needs to go die already.

I dont know how big Telcos havent been gobbled up by larger groups yet. They are such a slow moving gigantic revenue generating juicy targets. Big tech (advertising/media/cloud) is not big enough to do the gobbling. But big retail Walmart/Amazon are most def large enough to take out AT&T. And hope they do so cause I prefer dealing with them than the telcos.

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ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile are dumb pipes subject to lots of regulation. The only one with decent profit margin is Verizon, and they are already the most expensive.

ATT is loaded up with debt from stupid attempts to not just be a dumb pipe, and I do not see much upside from buying any of them. Any future cash flows are surely already priced in since they are all basically utilities, and I do not see where the efficiency/synergy gains would be for another business to merge with them.

Big tech would much rather commoditize the telcos and treat them as dumb pipes. You don't have to eat everyone upstream of you, as long as you capture most of the value and leave some bits to the commodity suppliers it's fine.

On the internet, most of the value (ads, shopping, socia etc.) is captured by tech cos. The pipes (despite the net neutrality reversal) continue to stay dumb pipes.

Telecom industry isn’t that attractive a target because they have high capital costs, actual competition, minimal moats, and are stuck on an endless upgrade treadmill 4g, 5g, …

AT&T is specifically a poor option because they are loaded up with so much debt.

I think you have your numbers wrong. Big tech is in some cases 10-20 times bigger than AT&T (market valuation). Big retail is just around double if you look at Walmart and everyone else much smaller (if you remove Amazon which I count as big tech).

I'm not quite sure it would be a benefit for the end users to have big tech also own the wireless networks.

I don't think so. Revenue wise they are much larger than tech. Big tech is mostly advertising.

Verizon/ATT/T-Mobile are in the ~$130B or less revenue arena.

Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet earn much more revenue, multiples more on some cases. Even Meta earns nearly as much as Verizon/ATT.

Amazon is not going to go out and build towers. They are going to license capacity from one of the three remaining infrastructure-providing carriers left (probably AT&T).

AT&T will never go away.

Additionally, any mobile network service that Amazon sells will have lower priority than mobile network service bought directly from the cell tower owners:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...

Telcos gobbled media.

Only Comcast did successfully, but it remains to be seen how successfully.

ATT and Verizon both failed, with ATT failing big (tens of billions wasted).

lol... as if Amazon is better than ATT.

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