I mean if you own all the infrastructure you're a monopoly. Infrastructure should not be owned a company. It should be a public utility that regional companies can buy and sell from ie electricity.
They didn't split anything up, the government is incompetent. They basically made them change the name so laymen can't follow. Then a of other companies picked up this tactic, Corp owns Scorp, owns LLC's, owns Corps, owns LCC and so on and so forth forever. It's pathetic. AT&T has the same monopoly structure that Intel had, difference is communications hasn't see any Lisa Su type champion to actually innovate in the sector as OP pointed out only way to break monopoly is to innovate and they did exactly that. Also for most telecommunications isn't as black and white as an instruction set. It's hard to innovate because AT&T can/will/does own the last mile in almost 100% of the internet, so it doesn't matter if you make a new "ISP" you still will send a crazy amount of profit to AT&T anyway. They are still using Copper, AT&T doesn't replace anything until its broken 90 times over. This will only get fixed when we stop using copper or trying to mold other materials to server a copper like purpose.
Google didn't struggle with AT&T directly they struggled with local regulators effectively granting AT&T Monopoly status. Passing laws that prevented Google from running cable on power line poles or outright banning them.
Indeed, the way the US government gets into bed with existing businesses to pass laws they lobbey for to prevent competition (either at a state level, such as in the case of car dealership laws, or at the Federal level, such as with the laws favouring big tech, Hollywood, pharma, agriculture, etc) reminds me of the Italian Fascist experiment of the "Corporate State", where Italy's largest companies were integrated directly into the government via the 'Chamber of Corporations' which effectively replaced their equivalent of the House of Representatives, until the government ultimately controlled 85% of the entire economy.
=AS SAME AS LAWS OF PHYSICS,DUDE......SO THAT BAN WAS FOR SAFETY REASONS ..........RUNNING ANOTHER CABLE ON POWER LINES WILL RESULT IN *_ARCING_* .....
@@enginerdy ....DUDE,EVERYTHING IS ARCING ..YOU JUST DONT KNOW HOW HUGE THE LOAD ON POWER LINES IS....... ......AND U SEE HOW EMPTY AREA AROUND ALL THESE POWER CABLES IS??--IT'S NOT BECAUSE OF JUST FOR THAT......EVEN IN FORESTS THERE'S VAST CUT OFFS.......AS SAFETY MEASURE ....SO NO WAY......BECAUSE OF NO POWER AND INTERNET WOULD VE BE ANYWAYS
@@robotnikkkk001 well, the fat wires are telephone, and those go everywhere without an issue. Cable internet and in some places fiber is up there already too. I’ve seen a downed line arc, but never seen a line arc to the low voltage lines on the lower section of the pole. You should look up once in a while.
Think of a dividend as growth. Instead of 6 percent given, you reinvest it. Roll that out and every 12 years it doubles. High dividends cut into stock price, but doesn't take away from the investment
If the dividend averages much higher than inflation, the stock price can remain flat, and still more than keeps up with inflation via the dividend. This is how stocks are SUPPOSED to work. That graph would look much different accounting for dividend reinvestment!
Alexander Graham Bell might be the only person in history who invented a trade, made it change the world, and still remained it's king even after a century
@@TheVirtualArena24 Bell Atlantic, a court ordered separated ATT company purchased GTE and changed their merged name to Verizon. GTE does operate various companies and has purchased other companies distinctly under GTE.
I always took Google Fiber as a push for the stagnation of the internet infrastructure holding back services and forcing established ISP's to either upgrade or get pushed out of the market.
So basically the government tried to split at&t into like the infinity stones but they just got stronger as they created their own separate monopolies. Good job US Government
Many do actually, if you're strictly talking Tier 1's. We have quite a lot of EU and Asian players there too. But it is very much still a monopoly in that market to it's segment of customers as well.
Craziest thing is if any one of the 3 major telecoms fail it would seriously cause issues nationwide. Imagine if all of these small businesses lost their phone service and or internet due to a company failing. Imagine if nearly 100 million phones just couldn’t make calls,text, or use the internet on the go. If AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon failed it would cripple the US pretty dang hard, would cost businesses billions in lost revenue, and could end up causing long term market issues in the sector
@James Love Service could not continue if there is no money able to keep the service functioning. It takes engineers, people to climb towers, and a slew of others to keep the towers functioning. Can't pay them and they won't work. Can't pay for electric you have no power. Oh your tower for damaged by a storm too bad no Money to fix it. You do not realize this isn't like A Radio shack that declared bankruptcy. If any major communications company failed it would be catastrophic for the nation
Your reasoning precisely why they will not fail. Customers need them and pay for them at whatever they want to charge. And by the way the only threat they have is new innovation which isn't invented yet.
In Australia they force the two main carriers here (Telstra & Optus) to allow small independent MVNO (Mobile virtual network operators) to piggyback their network for a small wholesale fee. When this was legislated it instantly created competition and dropped consumer prices. The telcos still have some advantages such as slightly higher data speeds and slightly better coverage but mostly they’re the same.
It's the same way here in the US. Smaller providers can provide a network overnight by using AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile as an MVNO and still sell service under a different brand at a cheaper price
As the other guy said, we have almost the same model here in the US. Other small companies use the major networks to run their own mobile service. It’s usually cheaper, prepaid, and 2nd tier service. So once the network gets high traffic, customers using the cheaper service (Straight Talk, Mint, Prepaid plans) get abysmal speeds and poor service, while the higher paying customers using the premium service (ATT/T-Mobile etc) get priority. In some areas the network traffic is low enough that it doesn’t matter too much, but in big cities, your service can become almost unusable for prime hours of the day.
@LiamMcBride I was skeptical of how they could do that. Pretty much my only hang up with switching to Mint or Patriot mobile. Might look into them again 😅
They still dominate in wireless services because they have the best coverage out of all the carriers. I've gone all over the country, even in the Rockies and would still get 3 bars vs their competition
T-Mobile overtook them a while ago when they started buying a fuck ton of spectrum in preparation for 5g Still depends where you are. Maybe you’re in a dead zone. But T-Mobile has had the best nationwide coverage for a minute now
@@kellcd no it has not. This is coming from someone who traveled all over the country with at&t. I tried T-Mobile. The service is the worst all of all of them
The problem with government interference in monopolies is that regardless of how you break them up, the same investors own the same assets. People scream to politicians to do something so eventually they do, just to appear to do something. Rockefeller famously responded to the breakup of Standard Oil by telling people to buy stock, because that was the most profitable business transaction in his life. Somehow making him multiple times wealthier was a punishment people were happy with.
This video was flawed when you stated that ATT is very good about staying in there lane. Did you not know that they bought TimeWarner and tried to be a TV/Movie/Video game studio? They also spent big to build an online advertisement platform. DirectTV and TimeWarner acquisitions are where most of ATT's debt stems from.
Yeah, it might be fair to say that they learned to stay in their lane VERY recently, but only because they were kicked back into their lane when they strayed from it.
This is a bit unfair to AT&T how can we say that people like Comcast are communications companies when they're in Hollywood making movies....but then claim that AT&T is "out of their lane" when they bought up time Warner and just because they lost money on it doesn't mean the buying decision was a mistake. In my opinion running time Warner was like running a gold mine or oil rig without a geologist, the asset wasn't the issue. Time Warner CAN be profitable.
My hope is that new technology like starlink will start to change the playing field for the communication sector. ATT has mostly played the game on ground level with the exception of their TV satellites.
Starlink has too many limitations such as the maximum users! Although the speeds are amazing with starlink the truth is it only has a fraction of the capacity
@@LogicallyAnswered yeah and I think those rural areas are where old communication companies shy away from because of the massive investment cost to reach those limited customers. That might give them an advantage to generate revenue out of those untapped areas to then become a real competitor in the urban areas. Just a thought.
@MikeProductions1000 civilian use is actually just a side show. It’s purpose are for military operations but I don’t think Elon wants to talk about this. Look at Ukraine. And he even offered it freely!
The best think for governments to do with monopolies is to regulate them in such a way to keep them into constant innovation as they can have very harmful side effects when left to stagnate like they tend to
No, a better situation is to determine why x company has a monopoly, then require that thing be part of the public domain. Then they should break up the company and force endless competition requiring they never merge. Also, the larger network should be a public utility that is managed by some agency in Washington.
@@meeponinthbit3466 this conversation is not about what the internet is. It’s a conversation on the idiocy of trying to strike down companies that benefit from EoS, learn to read you American pleb.
They need to separate the physical network from the services into two separate companies/industries, and then prevent preferential pricing to sister companies and force wholesale pricing to competitors.
Very interesting! I took an AT&T early retirement back in 2019! Micromanagement is the key word of AT+T New Jersey. No more signing in signing out for bathroom breaks !
"The government was so confident in this decision, but it ended up backfiring." That is like the key takeaway from literally everything the government gets involved in.
Yes, private companies never make decisions that backfire. They are perfect saintly organizations and do everything for the good of humanity. Capitalism good. Government bad. *sarcasm off*
@@badpuppy3 the Government gets this shit because its supposed to be the Collective will and good of the population or act within it under Liberal democracies. Unlike companies who are in for a profit people expect the Government to be far better.
@@Xo-3130 And I'm responding to the Libertarian talking points that always suggest dismantling the Government and handing control over to For-Profit Corporations AS IF that's going to somehow be better. It's a total fallacy.
I mean, governments have power over all of us because they have the law and the monopoly of force and can impose or forbid us just about anything. A business can't f your life no matter how big or powerful it is. Not to talk the State is always the thing that creates every single conflict, mass murder, genocides, wars and poverty...
I am glad this video touched on one point that is often overlooked and even here was understated, end user phone service is a radically complex service and while it seems like every one bitches about AT&T, they actually provide a pretty good service and have the largest infrastructure of any company in operation. One other thing about AT&T most don't know is that the plow a lot of money into innovation and even raw science, a lot like IBM in that way.
I think the US market is pretty level now between ATT, Vzn, and T-Mobile, they all have more than 100m customers, and all 3 have a ton of spectrum to build out a decent network.
Your introduction has things backwards about At&t. At&t stock is down but anyone who reinvested their dividends would have never lost a dollar. More than that, At&t did not sell off their assets to pay off their debt, they spun off Warner brothers (since the acquisition the stock has been going down faster, because shareholders did not like this so after a few years of prep it finally went through in Jan of 22). The new entity took a lot of At&t's assets but also 40 billion dollars of debt. At&t shareholders each receiver 0.7 shares of this new entity for every share of At&t they owned. that is to say, the stock price has gone down somewhat since the beginning of 2022 but the shareholders got compensated. At&t does still have a mountain of debt but they generate a lot of cash and will be paying it down. In fact Verizon now has more debt than At&t.
How much of assets does ATT own at this point thought? I have ATT fiber at my house, they dont come to fix it a sub contractor does. I call them for cell customer service Im not talking to an ATT employee its another sub contrtactor mostly in the Phns. Cell sites to most of these sites arent even owned by ATT they are owned by AT CC and SBA. So from a customer perspective what do they own? (heck they probibly dont evn own thier HQ in Dallas probibly leased)
@@ogjk you can google it, but even poorly maintained infrastructure is worth something. I believe they have something in the order of 250 billion dollars worth of assets
I agree with your last statement. Chasing endless growth is a fools errand, and leads to extremely high levels of debt in many cases (see ATT, valeant, etc), which can hamstring the business and hurt investors for years to come
Not only did most of the Bell companies merge back together, the largest independent phone company that was never part of AT&T, GTE, purchased the second largest independent phone company, then that company merged into Verizon. So AT&T and Verizon were actually controlled more of the phone business than the original AT&T had.
The current AT&T is not the same company. Its basically a bunch of those regionals (Baby Bells), from the 1984 break up, under SBC. They bought the shell of AT&T after its early 1990s 2nd break up. That smaller AT&T only kept the long distance and cell phone business, where it was smaller than Verizon. I still refer to AT&T as SBC. The old AT&T, had its Bell Labs research division, which invented the transistor, and its Western Electric manufacturing arm was formed into Lucent Technologies in that early 1990s break up.
Market capitalization of AT&T (T) Market cap: $139.33 Billion As of January 2023 AT&T has a market cap of $139.33 Billion. This makes AT&T the world's 88th most valuable company
Surprised you didn't talk about AT&T entering the retail space in the last 3 years (Targets, Walmart, Sam's Clubs) and outsourcing their customer acquisition in that space.. I think they are onto something
They are not. I worked at att and they cause insane issues. All the blame goes to att stores while the 3rd party makes commission off sale... they lie and we at the att stores got stuck getting cussed out and threatened because the 3rd party lied when signing them up... att even cut contracts with some 3rd parties because they caused lawsuits.
Monopolies exist in many segments of the networking world, you may see ATT only doing it within the US, but if you look a notch higher, ATT is also an "Tier 1", basically, not only they are large just for the US but large WORLDWIDE. We have multiple Tier 1 carries however, many European ones and Asian too. But monopolies exist for this market as well.
You mention Standard Oil.. I remember them as a kid and their competing with Shell.. If one put in a station on a corner, in no time the other would be right across the street. People enjoyed watching their gas price wars and always went for the best deal ..lol
Yes my Verizon FiOS is great it’s just the price is expensive. I paid $90 a month plus tax for gigabit speeds an AT&T doesn’t offer AT&T U-verse where I live at and I love AT&T I have AT&T is T-Mobile as my main two characters.
It was a strategic move from Google actually, it wasn’t expected to every eat up the market share. it basically forced other providers to up their speeds which was basically a win for them and a win for us
You also have to remember that the T stock price was lowered when AT&T sold off Warner bros. All T stock holders got the equivalent of lost share price in WBD stock.
I'm not an AT&T fan, but some of the info here is misleading to say the least. First, the stock price comment isn't accurate because they had at least one split in 1998, so the stock is essential worth double than what it was in 1995. Second, how much debt or assets a company has doesn't necessarily mean a company is failing or doing well. It is how they manage their debt and what it is compared to other companies in their sector. For communication companies, the industry average debt ratio is .69 as of 2020, and so for AT&T with 120/426 is only .28. That means AT&Ts debt ratio is almost 2.5 times better than the industry average which is good. Some good info here and there is just some context that needs to be added.
The current AT&T is not the same as the old AT&T. The old AT&T died when it was broken up. Now it's just the merger from all those baby Bells. When Bellsouth (Cingular) and Southwest Bell merged again it created the huge company we know today. There is no disruption because a nationwide cellular network is too expensive to build from scratch.
Yup, that's a main factor. Also CEO Charlie Brown's ambitions to make AT&T a force in computer hardware, based mainly on their expertise in digital switching systems. (Similar, but not the same, and a bad miscalculation.) Many additional bad calls by senior managers -- remember the AT&T Universal Card, their attempt to get into consumer finance? -- led the company to its current, less competitive state. And that mindset, that company culture, seems unlikely to be capable of significant change.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the 80s Government: Split up. Or Pay up. AT&T: ... *splits up* ... *later reabsorbs many of the companies years later* Government: What did we tell you? AT&T: You do know I supply your communications for emergency and some government services, right? Would be a real dick move if they stopped working... Government: Fuck. Fine.
I grew up without internet. Because of this I’m grateful to have it despite the negative social consequences. I will say though that the bill is a bit pricy
It's really hard to go up against a company that has been building the infrastructure of a business for 50 years. Even allowing for the usage of that infrastructure, the companies would probably still have to pay AT&T for the usage...
Just eliminate State privileges and competition will naturally appear. The State is what creates monopolies. In capitalism, the small fish eats the big one.
I think there is also some money that comes in from the government for military networks and support infrastructure. They have a long history of working with the US government in this regard. I think some of that money just isn't going to show up in annual reports.
The telecommunications act of 1996 is why AT&T exists in its current form. Also AT&T went through several transformations, including begging the nation's largest cable company during the early 2000's...
Hey logically answered, I love when your videos pop up on my recommended occasionally. Only thing is, I find I lose interest quickly, like halfway through your video that are 12-15 mins long. That’s just my thoughts, maybe make your videos more fast paced? I know maybe that just isn’t what everyone wants in this genre of video, that’s just me. Anyway, great video (or so far of the 8 mins I’ve watched) and great work!
I think you need to do more research. Verizon is derived from AT&T. AT&T wireless is a totally separate company. The AT&T original company is a fraction of itself and is mostly broken up. Google Wireless was never intended to compete with AT&T wireless or Verizon for that matter. It is a reseller of existing wireless services, same as Consumer Cellular or Net 10. They are not primary carriers. AT&T is a complicated story but mostly the lack of competition was in the long distance lines at the time. The breakup was extremely effective. If you were old enough to remember how the phone company worked prior to 1982 you would have a much better understanding.
Google attempt to add fiber was to introduce little competition to then complacent AT&T, as they didn't need to do anything unless they are threatened of their position - porter 5 forces And still compared to Asian country the prices are sky rocket expensive
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but when I clicked on the video I was hoping to gain insight, but all I feel like I heard in the video was a lot of negative context as to the company lives today? Otherwise it was a good video!
AT&T Is monopoly where I live in a fairly rural area of north/east/central California, we have AT&T DSL 600KBps/6mbps internet we pay $60 a month for 150GB data cap with 50GB increments of overage data costing $10, there is AT&T fiber line running all the way down our 5+ mile main road we live off of but it doesn't stop anywhere residential along our route, it goes directly to a school that 5 plus miles away and doesn't service anybody along that route, we pay more a month than Comcast lowest tier that is literally 20 times faster than the internet we are provided with a 10x bigger data cap... Thanks alot A-holes
Couple Things 1) The Govt paid for a TON if the copper wire network, and still does for those with landlines. The big issue AT&T has is they cant get Congress to pay for Fiber 2) Look up AT&T in Mexico, I was working there, and the joke was they just dropped 30M in the middle of Mexico and set it on fire, then tried to put it out by dropping more money on it. 3) Outsourced everything. Call Center I worked out was one of 8 (at least) that closed and moved overseas. Not only customer facing people, but whole internal depatments were gone. Gotta love trying to get something programmed and being told they are closed for the next 5 hours- leave a message and email a ticket. 4) everything pushed on sales, not much about maintaining what you have and improving it. See DSL.
SpaceX (Starlink) might be a disrupter in the less built out areas when it comes to Internet access. Maybe something will enter the market in built up cities and such in the future. Well, worst case, AT&T also owns a bunch of fibre going to various cities / datacenters, so they can always pivot to just be a bigger backbone bandwidth provider I guess.
I'm fairly sure they are already one of the "tier 1" networks on the internet and have had not just a nationwide but worldwide fiber backbone network for years. For anyone else not aware of what a tier 1 network is. "network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection (also known as settlement-free peering). Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 networks without paying any fees for the exchange of traffic in either direction. In contrast, some Tier 2 networks and all Tier 3 networks must pay to transmit traffic on other networks."
I canceled my AT&T home internet over one month ago. Return all equipment, have UPS receipts. They are trying to charge me $600 for early termination. When I was with them for 19 years, they are cooks.
I think you got Google’s motivation wrong. Google didn’t need money from the ISP business, they needed people to have higher bandwidth to enhance their existing portfolio. A monopoly, including a natural monopoly like AT&T has little incentive to increase service quality unless that monopoly is threatened. That’s what Google would do. Threaten the monopoly by introducing some service in an area, and only investing a little bit of money to do it. The established players would respond to protect their monopoly with orders of magnitude more investment. This has happened with municipal ISPs too. If you care about better service but not actually making money off the service pretending to compete with the established monopoly is a very cost efficient way of achieving that goal.
While I agree that AT&T enjoys significant moats due to how much physical capital they have, I disagree that it will take a large telecom revolution to take them down I think that this is a giant that can easily destroy itself. You cited the 140 billion in debt - they got to that point through terrible M&A. A few more of that and a higher debt burden and it'll crumble sooner or later.
Their debt is decreasing year by year. AT&T is too big to fail. Do you realize it would collapse the telecommunications market if AT&T failed? Verizon/T-Mobile could not afford to buy it and it’s assets/debt, and simply migrating it’s user base would cripple the other networks even with 5G being in its post 2025 state. It would also most likely end in a recession.
@@pokerus4511 I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that their debt is decreasing because I’m looking at their balance sheet and neither the quarterly nor annual data show that trend. And its not like I said that they’d collapse overnight. What’s more likely is that they slowly fade into irrelevance as small upstarts, (e.g. pure plays in mobile / tele communications in geographically isolated areas) build up over the course of a decade at least and nibble away at AT&T
There are things that could have stopped AT&T that werent mentioned here. AT&T's purchase of Warner Brothers and then basically giving it to Discovery Inc to offload all of their debt, if AT&T kept Warner Brothers they would be much worst off. The companies that could take on AT&T if desired are Comcast, Verizon, Apple, Microsoft and Blackrock. If Verizon or Comcast tried anything unusual they would probably end up in the same boat as AT&T in the 80's. Verizon could have used Vodafone to stop AT&T is desired back when Verizon Wireless was a venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone before Verizon brought them out. Comcast could have easily purchased Sprint when it had Wireless and Landline service or simply purchased Sprint and Embarq seperately or T-Mobile US and could have been major competition for AT&T. Apple & Microsoft if desired have the funds and ability to screw over AT&T but wont.
Can you make a video explaining how they bought some Mexican carriers and renamed it with AT&T MX it would be interesting to know an American brand operating in Mexico 🇲🇽
Your conclusion as to why the break-up didn't work is flawed at its core. The purpose of breaking up AT&T was to create competition, but only a decade later regulators allowed all the baby bells to merge back together. That is why they are still so big today. Not because breaking up monopolies doesn't work, but because the company didn't stay broken up.
@@LogicallyAnswered tbf both of those companies were helped by mergers with other companies (although tbf mostly with companies that weren't formed after Standard Oil was broken up...besides Exxon and Mobil)
I think that the point here is that breaking up monopolies doesn't work... if no competition rises in its place. No one was gonna fight the Baby Bells because within their regions, they had such a massive competitive advantage.
@@GyroCannon the idea of breaking them up would have been that they would have eventually started to compete with each other. The problem with that, in this case, is phone service is usually granted a local monopoly by local governments in order to avoid having too many companies running wires everywhere.
"Are you happy with your internet provider?" Oh please. If you live in the US, ain't no one happy with their internet providers. I like many people are forced to 1 provider that overprices. It's not a monopoly because I can move somewhere else. Great.
In the recent bio of William Fox "The Man who Made the Movies", the author says in spite of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the govt. had limited ability to break up monopolies or control them. Anybody trying to break into a business faced unfair competition or had to pay money to the right people to get a piece of the pie.
Western Electric was owned by AT&T until 1995 when the rights and intellectual property were sold to a man who nows owns the Western Electric brand name. The company manufactures certain Western Electric vacuum tubes and audio equipment.
I feel like since they got rid of Randall Stephenson as CEO and replaced them with the current guy (don't know the name off the top of my head) they seem to be getting back on track. Focusing on what their business is actually about, telecommunications. Not media. Biggest mistake AT&T has made in recent years IMO is the crazy amount of money they spent buying DirecTV when cord cutting was not only already a well-known and popular thing but accelerating as a trend. Go figure they end up selling/spinning it off as best they can (not hard to imagine they would have trouble finding someone interested). That $67 billion would have been FAR better spent going towards expanding the availability of AT&T Fiber. But I do think the new CEO gets it. After he took over, they started the process of selling off / spinning off Turner media, DTV etc. And have been far more focused on expanding AT&T Fiber on the wireline side and of course upgrades to the wireless network. They have been doing a pretty good job so far, adding 2.5+ million new service locations in 2021 and 2022 with the goal to offer the service to 30 million customer locations by 2025. I live in Hot Springs, Arkansas (population ~32,000-34,000) and I have seen contractors out running fiber like crazy for AT&T. They actually just started the process of upgrading our neighborhood from fiber to the node (what used to be called U-verse) which we currently get 100/20 from to AT&T Fiber. Can't wait to upgrade!
I think starlink spells the end of AT&T. Just look at what snapdragon showed off at CES this year satellite link capabilities on smartphones, and iPhone already did that last year. This will only get better
Nope. Starlink solves a completely different problem. it is for far off places where laying a cable is not financially sustainable. Fiber is still far superior than starlink when it comes to places with good density of users.
I feel like at this point att is just a front for the NSA. Thats why it doesnt matter how much debt they are in, the NSA needs att to stay alive to keep themselves operational
Even in India the telecom had massive debt And thanks to reliance who helped it even grow more by becoming oil to telecom company and giving 1gbday data for free for almost a year
When I took an economics course in 1970, AT&T was cited as an example of "a natural monopoly"
This comment made my day, thanks!
I mean if you own all the infrastructure you're a monopoly. Infrastructure should not be owned a company. It should be a public utility that regional companies can buy and sell from ie electricity.
@@KRYMauL no.
@@KRYMauL so you mean it should be owned by the govt? That makes sense only if you think the govt. is highly efficient and not corrupt.
they created modern world so...
The problem with how the government split up AT&T is that they created 7 separate regional monopolies without any real competition in their area.
That's why they should be turned into a Consumer Cooperative.
And then it let them buy each other up. AT&T was purchased by a company that was formed from multiple baby bells, which then renamed itself AT&T.
Good enough for government work
They didn't split anything up, the government is incompetent. They basically made them change the name so laymen can't follow. Then a of other companies picked up this tactic, Corp owns Scorp, owns LLC's, owns Corps, owns LCC and so on and so forth forever. It's pathetic. AT&T has the same monopoly structure that Intel had, difference is communications hasn't see any Lisa Su type champion to actually innovate in the sector as OP pointed out only way to break monopoly is to innovate and they did exactly that. Also for most telecommunications isn't as black and white as an instruction set. It's hard to innovate because AT&T can/will/does own the last mile in almost 100% of the internet, so it doesn't matter if you make a new "ISP" you still will send a crazy amount of profit to AT&T anyway.
They are still using Copper, AT&T doesn't replace anything until its broken 90 times over.
This will only get fixed when we stop using copper or trying to mold other materials to server a copper like purpose.
It's a bit of a tough situation, then the government gets involved, and then it's a clusterfuk
My biggest take away from this is that the government is really bad at predicting unintended consequences.
To be fair, if one could predict all the consequences, they could mitigate any unfavorable ones and there would be no unintended consequences. 😉
Congress is for sale. On the take. And they wouldn't have it any other way. And that's BOTH SIDES.
@@davidroddini1512 berkshire hathaway?
Governments are run by people. What do you expect? AT&T is no better.
Google didn't struggle with AT&T directly they struggled with local regulators effectively granting AT&T Monopoly status. Passing laws that prevented Google from running cable on power line poles or outright banning them.
Indeed, the way the US government gets into bed with existing businesses to pass laws they lobbey for to prevent competition (either at a state level, such as in the case of car dealership laws, or at the Federal level, such as with the laws favouring big tech, Hollywood, pharma, agriculture, etc) reminds me of the Italian Fascist experiment of the "Corporate State", where Italy's largest companies were integrated directly into the government via the 'Chamber of Corporations' which effectively replaced their equivalent of the House of Representatives, until the government ultimately controlled 85% of the entire economy.
=AS SAME AS LAWS OF PHYSICS,DUDE......SO THAT BAN WAS FOR SAFETY REASONS
..........RUNNING ANOTHER CABLE ON POWER LINES WILL RESULT IN *_ARCING_* .....
@@robotnikkkk001telephone and fiber cables don’t arc to the power lines because they’re hung like 10ft below them. It’s not rocket science.
@@enginerdy ....DUDE,EVERYTHING IS ARCING
..YOU JUST DONT KNOW HOW HUGE THE LOAD ON POWER LINES IS.......
......AND U SEE HOW EMPTY AREA AROUND ALL THESE POWER CABLES IS??--IT'S NOT BECAUSE OF JUST FOR THAT......EVEN IN FORESTS THERE'S VAST CUT OFFS.......AS SAFETY MEASURE
....SO NO WAY......BECAUSE OF NO POWER AND INTERNET WOULD VE BE ANYWAYS
@@robotnikkkk001 well, the fat wires are telephone, and those go everywhere without an issue. Cable internet and in some places fiber is up there already too. I’ve seen a downed line arc, but never seen a line arc to the low voltage lines on the lower section of the pole.
You should look up once in a while.
I think the fact that their stock value has halved is more a consequence of being overvalued in the first place
Think of a dividend as growth. Instead of 6 percent given, you reinvest it. Roll that out and every 12 years it doubles. High dividends cut into stock price, but doesn't take away from the investment
@@cmdr1911 you guys, like this video, don’t know the recent history. They screwed up, took on huge debt and halved the dividend.
If the dividend averages much higher than inflation, the stock price can remain flat, and still more than keeps up with inflation via the dividend. This is how stocks are SUPPOSED to work. That graph would look much different accounting for dividend reinvestment!
Alexander Graham Bell might be the only person in history who invented a trade, made it change the world, and still remained it's king even after a century
Ford?
@YodaSGamerTag he revolutionized the manufacturing of the car, but didn't invent the internal combustion engine, if I remember correctly
@@malaineeward5249 Karl Benz invented the automobile.
@@KTJohnsonkidThunder Yeah, and that legacy lives on in Mercedes-Benz
*AT&T exists
Government : I'm gonna make this man whole career.
Didn't knew Verizon belongs to at&t.
At&t doesn’t own Verizon. But Verizon is an evolution of the original AT&T’s subsidiaries.
@@LogicallyAnswered ohh. Thats why I was confused at last part
Verizon emerged from baby bells Atlantic and GTE
@@TheVirtualArena24 Bell Atlantic, a court ordered separated ATT company purchased GTE and changed their merged name to Verizon. GTE does operate various companies and has purchased other companies distinctly under GTE.
When Americans realise America is still ran by the British 😂
I always took Google Fiber as a push for the stagnation of the internet infrastructure holding back services and forcing established ISP's to either upgrade or get pushed out of the market.
Bell Labs was a national treasure, so said my Dad, a brilliant physicist and extraordinary educator.
So basically the government tried to split at&t into like the infinity stones but they just got stronger as they created their own separate monopolies. Good job US Government
They own the backbone of the internet
Many do actually, if you're strictly talking Tier 1's. We have quite a lot of EU and Asian players there too. But it is very much still a monopoly in that market to it's segment of customers as well.
Craziest thing is if any one of the 3 major telecoms fail it would seriously cause issues nationwide. Imagine if all of these small businesses lost their phone service and or internet due to a company failing. Imagine if nearly 100 million phones just couldn’t make calls,text, or use the internet on the go. If AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon failed it would cripple the US pretty dang hard, would cost businesses billions in lost revenue, and could end up causing long term market issues in the sector
No lol that's not how it works the infrastructure won't magically disappear some other company will control it
One failed for a day in Canada. I believe it was Telus. Hacked. Businesses couldn't recieve payments etc
Too big to fail is a pussy idea.
Service would proceed in a bankruptcy and they would get bought out.
@James Love Service could not continue if there is no money able to keep the service functioning. It takes engineers, people to climb towers, and a slew of others to keep the towers functioning. Can't pay them and they won't work. Can't pay for electric you have no power. Oh your tower for damaged by a storm too bad no Money to fix it. You do not realize this isn't like A Radio shack that declared bankruptcy. If any major communications company failed it would be catastrophic for the nation
Your reasoning precisely why they will not fail. Customers need them and pay for them at whatever they want to charge. And by the way the only threat they have is new innovation which isn't invented yet.
In Australia they force the two main carriers here (Telstra & Optus) to allow small independent MVNO (Mobile virtual network operators) to piggyback their network for a small wholesale fee. When this was legislated it instantly created competition and dropped consumer prices. The telcos still have some advantages such as slightly higher data speeds and slightly better coverage but mostly they’re the same.
It's the same way here in the US. Smaller providers can provide a network overnight by using AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile as an MVNO and still sell service under a different brand at a cheaper price
As the other guy said, we have almost the same model here in the US. Other small companies use the major networks to run their own mobile service. It’s usually cheaper, prepaid, and 2nd tier service. So once the network gets high traffic, customers using the cheaper service (Straight Talk, Mint, Prepaid plans) get abysmal speeds and poor service, while the higher paying customers using the premium service (ATT/T-Mobile etc) get priority. In some areas the network traffic is low enough that it doesn’t matter too much, but in big cities, your service can become almost unusable for prime hours of the day.
@LiamMcBride I was skeptical of how they could do that. Pretty much my only hang up with switching to Mint or Patriot mobile. Might look into them again 😅
@@malaineeward5249 yeah it essentially allows the networks to sell excess capacity that they had left over after their subscribers get access.
That's so sad: the breakup bought us nothing but cost us Bell Labs.
They still dominate in wireless services because they have the best coverage out of all the carriers. I've gone all over the country, even in the Rockies and would still get 3 bars vs their competition
T-Mobile overtook them a while ago when they started buying a fuck ton of spectrum in preparation for 5g
Still depends where you are. Maybe you’re in a dead zone. But T-Mobile has had the best nationwide coverage for a minute now
@@kellcd no it has not. This is coming from someone who traveled all over the country with at&t. I tried T-Mobile. The service is the worst all of all of them
The problem with government interference in monopolies is that regardless of how you break them up, the same investors own the same assets. People scream to politicians to do something so eventually they do, just to appear to do something.
Rockefeller famously responded to the breakup of Standard Oil by telling people to buy stock, because that was the most profitable business transaction in his life. Somehow making him multiple times wealthier was a punishment people were happy with.
Furthermore, the State is what creates monopolies in the first place.
AT&T is too important to information gathering FEDs that they’ll never truly go out of business.
😂
Great information. Stories like this will NEVER make the news.
Thanks man!
Why would they? This is niche content, news coverage is for the broader public
This video was flawed when you stated that ATT is very good about staying in there lane. Did you not know that they bought TimeWarner and tried to be a TV/Movie/Video game studio? They also spent big to build an online advertisement platform. DirectTV and TimeWarner acquisitions are where most of ATT's debt stems from.
Yeah, it might be fair to say that they learned to stay in their lane VERY recently, but only because they were kicked back into their lane when they strayed from it.
This is a bit unfair to AT&T how can we say that people like Comcast are communications companies when they're in Hollywood making movies....but then claim that AT&T is "out of their lane" when they bought up time Warner and just because they lost money on it doesn't mean the buying decision was a mistake. In my opinion running time Warner was like running a gold mine or oil rig without a geologist, the asset wasn't the issue. Time Warner CAN be profitable.
And that AT&T today is not the same company that AGB founded. AT&T is SBC renamed, as SBC (originally a Baby Bell) bought AT&T in 2005.
My hope is that new technology like starlink will start to change the playing field for the communication sector. ATT has mostly played the game on ground level with the exception of their TV satellites.
Unfortunately Starlink isn’t comparable to fiber, but Starlink is great for rural areas.
Starlink has too many limitations such as the maximum users! Although the speeds are amazing with starlink the truth is it only has a fraction of the capacity
@@LogicallyAnswered yeah and I think those rural areas are where old communication companies shy away from because of the massive investment cost to reach those limited customers. That might give them an advantage to generate revenue out of those untapped areas to then become a real competitor in the urban areas. Just a thought.
@MikeProductions1000 civilian use is actually just a side show. It’s purpose are for military operations but I don’t think Elon wants to talk about this. Look at Ukraine. And he even offered it freely!
they created the f**** UNIX!!!!!!!
3 minutes in you can hear angry Meucci noises.
Great video as always, there is no better place on RUclips to learn about companies
Thanks bro!
that was a great story mate.
Very interesting. Thanks for your work.
Thank you Sam
The best think for governments to do with monopolies is to regulate them in such a way to keep them into constant innovation as they can have very harmful side effects when left to stagnate like they tend to
No, a better situation is to determine why x company has a monopoly, then require that thing be part of the public domain. Then they should break up the company and force endless competition requiring they never merge.
Also, the larger network should be a public utility that is managed by some agency in Washington.
@@KRYMauL soooo you mean destroy your economy by never allowing Economies of Scale? Sounds stupid. Well done.
@@oppionatedindividual8256 you know the internet is a TON of smaller companies all connecting with peering agreements... Right?
@@meeponinthbit3466 this conversation is not about what the internet is. It’s a conversation on the idiocy of trying to strike down companies that benefit from EoS, learn to read you American pleb.
They need to separate the physical network from the services into two separate companies/industries, and then prevent preferential pricing to sister companies and force wholesale pricing to competitors.
Very interesting! I took an AT&T early retirement back in 2019! Micromanagement is the key word of AT+T New Jersey. No more signing in signing out for bathroom breaks !
"The government was so confident in this decision, but it ended up backfiring." That is like the key takeaway from literally everything the government gets involved in.
Yes, private companies never make decisions that backfire. They are perfect saintly organizations and do everything for the good of humanity. Capitalism good. Government bad. *sarcasm off*
@@badpuppy3 the Government gets this shit because its supposed to be the Collective will and good of the population or act within it under Liberal democracies. Unlike companies who are in for a profit people expect the Government to be far better.
@@Xo-3130 And I'm responding to the Libertarian talking points that always suggest dismantling the Government and handing control over to For-Profit Corporations AS IF that's going to somehow be better. It's a total fallacy.
I mean, governments have power over all of us because they have the law and the monopoly of force and can impose or forbid us just about anything. A business can't f your life no matter how big or powerful it is.
Not to talk the State is always the thing that creates every single conflict, mass murder, genocides, wars and poverty...
I am glad this video touched on one point that is often overlooked and even here was understated, end user phone service is a radically complex service and while it seems like every one bitches about AT&T, they actually provide a pretty good service and have the largest infrastructure of any company in operation. One other thing about AT&T most don't know is that the plow a lot of money into innovation and even raw science, a lot like IBM in that way.
I think the US market is pretty level now between ATT, Vzn, and T-Mobile, they all have more than 100m customers, and all 3 have a ton of spectrum to build out a decent network.
Your introduction has things backwards about At&t. At&t stock is down but anyone who reinvested their dividends would have never lost a dollar. More than that, At&t did not sell off their assets to pay off their debt, they spun off Warner brothers (since the acquisition the stock has been going down faster, because shareholders did not like this so after a few years of prep it finally went through in Jan of 22). The new entity took a lot of At&t's assets but also 40 billion dollars of debt. At&t shareholders each receiver 0.7 shares of this new entity for every share of At&t they owned. that is to say, the stock price has gone down somewhat since the beginning of 2022 but the shareholders got compensated. At&t does still have a mountain of debt but they generate a lot of cash and will be paying it down. In fact Verizon now has more debt than At&t.
Thanks for the clarification Matan
How much of assets does ATT own at this point thought? I have ATT fiber at my house, they dont come to fix it a sub contractor does. I call them for cell customer service Im not talking to an ATT employee its another sub contrtactor mostly in the Phns. Cell sites to most of these sites arent even owned by ATT they are owned by AT CC and SBA. So from a customer perspective what do they own? (heck they probibly dont evn own thier HQ in Dallas probibly leased)
@@ogjk you can google it, but even poorly maintained infrastructure is worth something. I believe they have something in the order of 250 billion dollars worth of assets
@@TheGoodrog It's easy to over-value an asset.
@@machintrucGaming for sure but it still has to be a huge amount
I’ve had AT&T cell service since the late 90s… They were great up until about 10 years ago. I think I’m finally ready to make the switch.
Check out T-Mobile 5G
They’re working on their towers so the service is soso rn. But in my area it’s has improved alot in the past months
Him: Are you happy with you internet provider?
Me on AT&T Fiber: meh, no complaints I guess.
AI doesn't have it yet... I can still tell the voice.
We've had ATT for a few decades. Very happy.
I agree with your last statement. Chasing endless growth is a fools errand, and leads to extremely high levels of debt in many cases (see ATT, valeant, etc), which can hamstring the business and hurt investors for years to come
Not only did most of the Bell companies merge back together, the largest independent phone company that was never part of AT&T, GTE, purchased the second largest independent phone company, then that company merged into Verizon. So AT&T and Verizon were actually controlled more of the phone business than the original AT&T had.
Well said.
Thanks, Harry...
The current AT&T is not the same company. Its basically a bunch of those regionals (Baby Bells), from the 1984 break up, under SBC. They bought the shell of AT&T after its early 1990s 2nd break up. That smaller AT&T only kept the long distance and cell phone business, where it was smaller than Verizon. I still refer to AT&T as SBC.
The old AT&T, had its Bell Labs research division, which invented the transistor, and its Western Electric manufacturing arm was formed into Lucent Technologies in that early 1990s break up.
Another great video brother!! Thanks!!
Thank you Daniel!
Market capitalization of AT&T (T)
Market cap: $139.33 Billion
As of January 2023 AT&T has a market cap of $139.33 Billion. This makes AT&T the world's 88th most valuable company
Surprised you didn't talk about AT&T entering the retail space in the last 3 years (Targets, Walmart, Sam's Clubs) and outsourcing their customer acquisition in that space.. I think they are onto something
They are not. I worked at att and they cause insane issues. All the blame goes to att stores while the 3rd party makes commission off sale... they lie and we at the att stores got stuck getting cussed out and threatened because the 3rd party lied when signing them up... att even cut contracts with some 3rd parties because they caused lawsuits.
Thank you
Im buying a few shares because it just makes sense
Glad to learn about a company at least.
Monopolies exist in many segments of the networking world, you may see ATT only doing it within the US, but if you look a notch higher, ATT is also an "Tier 1", basically, not only they are large just for the US but large WORLDWIDE. We have multiple Tier 1 carries however, many European ones and Asian too. But monopolies exist for this market as well.
I just switched from them to Verizon. I really want to go back to AT&T.
I switched from Verizon to att and I have no regrets
Verizon used to be GTE some time ago.
You mention Standard Oil.. I remember them as a kid and their competing with Shell.. If one put in a station on a corner, in no time the other would be right across the street. People enjoyed watching their gas price wars and always went for the best deal ..lol
You should have integrated the bell labs story and the Unix operating system origin into this video essay
Thanks for the feedback Fredrick
Yes my Verizon FiOS is great it’s just the price is expensive. I paid $90 a month plus tax for gigabit speeds an AT&T doesn’t offer AT&T U-verse where I live at and I love AT&T I have AT&T is T-Mobile as my main two characters.
Keep up the good work AT&T
I have Google Fiber and it is glorious!
It was a strategic move from Google actually, it wasn’t expected to every eat up the market share. it basically forced other providers to up their speeds which was basically a win for them and a win for us
You also have to remember that the T stock price was lowered when AT&T sold off Warner bros. All T stock holders got the equivalent of lost share price in WBD stock.
I'm not an AT&T fan, but some of the info here is misleading to say the least. First, the stock price comment isn't accurate because they had at least one split in 1998, so the stock is essential worth double than what it was in 1995. Second, how much debt or assets a company has doesn't necessarily mean a company is failing or doing well. It is how they manage their debt and what it is compared to other companies in their sector. For communication companies, the industry average debt ratio is .69 as of 2020, and so for AT&T with 120/426 is only .28. That means AT&Ts debt ratio is almost 2.5 times better than the industry average which is good. Some good info here and there is just some context that needs to be added.
The stock graph accounts for stock splits :)
Love the video but Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone. I suggest watching some Sopranos for reference 😂
The current AT&T is not the same as the old AT&T. The old AT&T died when it was broken up.
Now it's just the merger from all those baby Bells. When Bellsouth (Cingular) and Southwest Bell merged again it created the huge company we know today. There is no disruption because a nationwide cellular network is too expensive to build from scratch.
How could you overlook the MCI vs ATT court case which precipitated the breakup of ATT?
Yup, that's a main factor. Also CEO Charlie Brown's ambitions to make AT&T a force in computer hardware, based mainly on their expertise in digital switching systems. (Similar, but not the same, and a bad miscalculation.) Many additional bad calls by senior managers -- remember the AT&T Universal Card, their attempt to get into consumer finance? -- led the company to its current, less competitive state. And that mindset, that company culture, seems unlikely to be capable of significant change.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the 80s
Government: Split up. Or Pay up.
AT&T: ... *splits up* ... *later reabsorbs many of the companies years later*
Government: What did we tell you?
AT&T: You do know I supply your communications for emergency and some government services, right? Would be a real dick move if they stopped working...
Government: Fuck. Fine.
Imagine having a stock that is at the same value as 1995 and reinvesting all dividends! You would be quiet well off.
I grew up without internet. Because of this I’m grateful to have it despite the negative social consequences.
I will say though that the bill is a bit pricy
It's really hard to go up against a company that has been building the infrastructure of a business for 50 years. Even allowing for the usage of that infrastructure, the companies would probably still have to pay AT&T for the usage...
Just eliminate State privileges and competition will naturally appear. The State is what creates monopolies.
In capitalism, the small fish eats the big one.
But u didn't mention about merger with discovery. Can u provide details
I think there is also some money that comes in from the government for military networks and support infrastructure. They have a long history of working with the US government in this regard. I think some of that money just isn't going to show up in annual reports.
They also have first net. My buddies Dad likes to say it's hard to tell where the government ends and AT&T begins.
The telecommunications act of 1996 is why AT&T exists in its current form. Also AT&T went through several transformations, including begging the nation's largest cable company during the early 2000's...
I'm not sure why you didn't mention Comcast at any point during this video?
Hey logically answered, I love when your videos pop up on my recommended occasionally. Only thing is, I find I lose interest quickly, like halfway through your video that are 12-15 mins long. That’s just my thoughts, maybe make your videos more fast paced? I know maybe that just isn’t what everyone wants in this genre of video, that’s just me. Anyway, great video (or so far of the 8 mins I’ve watched) and great work!
I appreciate the feedback man
@@LogicallyAnswered yeah np
ATT was SouthWestern Bell and changed their name when they bought ATT.
AT&T = Humpty Dumpty
They’ll always find a way to put themselves back together again
I think you need to do more research. Verizon is derived from AT&T. AT&T wireless is a totally separate company. The AT&T original company is a fraction of itself and is mostly broken up. Google Wireless was never intended to compete with AT&T wireless or Verizon for that matter. It is a reseller of existing wireless services, same as Consumer Cellular or Net 10. They are not primary carriers. AT&T is a complicated story but mostly the lack of competition was in the long distance lines at the time. The breakup was extremely effective. If you were old enough to remember how the phone company worked prior to 1982 you would have a much better understanding.
Google attempt to add fiber was to introduce little competition to then complacent AT&T, as they didn't need to do anything unless they are threatened of their position - porter 5 forces
And still compared to Asian country the prices are sky rocket expensive
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but when I clicked on the video I was hoping to gain insight, but all I feel like I heard in the video was a lot of negative context as to the company lives today? Otherwise it was a good video!
AT&T Is monopoly where I live in a fairly rural area of north/east/central California, we have AT&T DSL 600KBps/6mbps internet we pay $60 a month for 150GB data cap with 50GB increments of overage data costing $10, there is AT&T fiber line running all the way down our 5+ mile main road we live off of but it doesn't stop anywhere residential along our route, it goes directly to a school that 5 plus miles away and doesn't service anybody along that route, we pay more a month than Comcast lowest tier that is literally 20 times faster than the internet we are provided with a 10x bigger data cap... Thanks alot A-holes
Always thought of this company as an evil monopoly I had such disdain towards it. And avoided it like a plague.
Same here glad I have never had them and got T-Mobile
I mean, they have the best deals in the best plans in the cheapest phone service with the right discounts lol
@@Szari124 have fun paying more and not getting a free phone every couple of years😂 and your service is meh
@@Szari124yeah you’re service sucks and your data gets leaked every year 2-4 times, hell bunch ppl probably have your card info or social 😂
I remember AT&T was bought out by Bell South, but they kept the AT&T name for marketing!!
Yep. They eventually got renamed to SBC and a few years later, renamed back to AT&T.
I can't believe they can just drop 130 billion dollars for a quick upgrade
😂
Couple Things
1) The Govt paid for a TON if the copper wire network, and still does for those with landlines. The big issue AT&T has is they cant get Congress to pay for Fiber
2) Look up AT&T in Mexico, I was working there, and the joke was they just dropped 30M in the middle of Mexico and set it on fire, then tried to put it out by dropping more money on it.
3) Outsourced everything. Call Center I worked out was one of 8 (at least) that closed and moved overseas. Not only customer facing people, but whole internal depatments were gone. Gotta love trying to get something programmed and being told they are closed for the next 5 hours- leave a message and email a ticket.
4) everything pushed on sales, not much about maintaining what you have and improving it. See DSL.
SpaceX (Starlink) might be a disrupter in the less built out areas when it comes to Internet access. Maybe something will enter the market in built up cities and such in the future.
Well, worst case, AT&T also owns a bunch of fibre going to various cities / datacenters, so they can always pivot to just be a bigger backbone bandwidth provider I guess.
I'm fairly sure they are already one of the "tier 1" networks on the internet and have had not just a nationwide but worldwide fiber backbone network for years.
For anyone else not aware of what a tier 1 network is.
"network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection (also known as settlement-free peering). Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 networks without paying any fees for the exchange of traffic in either direction. In contrast, some Tier 2 networks and all Tier 3 networks must pay to transmit traffic on other networks."
If Starlink could provide internet cheaper than lined connections ... That would be a good competition
"Are you happy with your internet provider? Comment down below."
Literally every comment: "No, they suck. A lot. A lot alot."
You only mentioned Verizon and AT&T as a monopoly but what is with T Mobile US, they even have a higher market cap so what's with them.
They are no normal competitor, because they are a former state owned company
Yeah, T mobile is a special case
@@LogicallyAnswered Maybe a video about em 😅
I canceled my AT&T home internet over one month ago. Return all equipment, have UPS receipts. They are trying to charge me $600 for early termination. When I was with them for 19 years, they are cooks.
I think you got Google’s motivation wrong. Google didn’t need money from the ISP business, they needed people to have higher bandwidth to enhance their existing portfolio. A monopoly, including a natural monopoly like AT&T has little incentive to increase service quality unless that monopoly is threatened. That’s what Google would do. Threaten the monopoly by introducing some service in an area, and only investing a little bit of money to do it. The established players would respond to protect their monopoly with orders of magnitude more investment.
This has happened with municipal ISPs too. If you care about better service but not actually making money off the service pretending to compete with the established monopoly is a very cost efficient way of achieving that goal.
Ah, that’s an interesting perspective
While I agree that AT&T enjoys significant moats due to how much physical capital they have, I disagree that it will take a large telecom revolution to take them down
I think that this is a giant that can easily destroy itself. You cited the 140 billion in debt - they got to that point through terrible M&A. A few more of that and a higher debt burden and it'll crumble sooner or later.
Their debt is decreasing year by year. AT&T is too big to fail. Do you realize it would collapse the telecommunications market if AT&T failed? Verizon/T-Mobile could not afford to buy it and it’s assets/debt, and simply migrating it’s user base would cripple the other networks even with 5G being in its post 2025 state. It would also most likely end in a recession.
@@pokerus4511 I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that their debt is decreasing because I’m looking at their balance sheet and neither the quarterly nor annual data show that trend.
And its not like I said that they’d collapse overnight. What’s more likely is that they slowly fade into irrelevance as small upstarts, (e.g. pure plays in mobile / tele communications in geographically isolated areas) build up over the course of a decade at least and nibble away at AT&T
Insiders must’ve made a fortune, breaking them up and then putting them back together again
Could you do a analysis about IBM ?
Already have one :)
There are things that could have stopped AT&T that werent mentioned here. AT&T's purchase of Warner Brothers and then basically giving it to Discovery Inc to offload all of their debt, if AT&T kept Warner Brothers they would be much worst off.
The companies that could take on AT&T if desired are Comcast, Verizon, Apple, Microsoft and Blackrock. If Verizon or Comcast tried anything unusual they would probably end up in the same boat as AT&T in the 80's.
Verizon could have used Vodafone to stop AT&T is desired back when Verizon Wireless was a venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone before Verizon brought them out.
Comcast could have easily purchased Sprint when it had Wireless and Landline service or simply purchased Sprint and Embarq seperately or T-Mobile US and could have been major competition for AT&T.
Apple & Microsoft if desired have the funds and ability to screw over AT&T but wont.
They’re alive because they’re a bear monopoly. They own Time Warner and a bunch of other things to say the least.
You are not up to date. Time Warner was sold/given away.
They got rid of Warner about a year ago now.
Yep. Discover owns it
@@TheBooban that was Warner media. Time Warner the cable company which is a cash cow is still with AT&T.
@@matheusgomes9 TimeWarner cable was acquired by Charter Communications (Branded Spectrum) not AT&T.
It was one of the best of my investments
Can you make a video explaining how they bought some Mexican carriers and renamed it with AT&T MX it would be interesting to know an American brand operating in Mexico 🇲🇽
Your conclusion as to why the break-up didn't work is flawed at its core. The purpose of breaking up AT&T was to create competition, but only a decade later regulators allowed all the baby bells to merge back together. That is why they are still so big today. Not because breaking up monopolies doesn't work, but because the company didn't stay broken up.
Well, even if they didn’t allow them to rejoin, I think a few of the baby bells would’ve risen above the rest anyway similar to Exxon and Chevron.
@@LogicallyAnswered tbf both of those companies were helped by mergers with other companies (although tbf mostly with companies that weren't formed after Standard Oil was broken up...besides Exxon and Mobil)
I think that the point here is that breaking up monopolies doesn't work... if no competition rises in its place.
No one was gonna fight the Baby Bells because within their regions, they had such a massive competitive advantage.
@@GyroCannon the idea of breaking them up would have been that they would have eventually started to compete with each other. The problem with that, in this case, is phone service is usually granted a local monopoly by local governments in order to avoid having too many companies running wires everywhere.
Can't wait for this to happen to this generation of megacorps (amazon, meta etc)
Don’t forget, Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born inventor.
4:27 Jekyll Island spotted
"Are you happy with your internet provider?" Oh please. If you live in the US, ain't no one happy with their internet providers. I like many people are forced to 1 provider that overprices. It's not a monopoly because I can move somewhere else. Great.
That massive asset drop was because they sold HBO.....
AT&T today is not the same company that AGB founded. AT&T is SBC renamed, as SBC (originally a Baby Bell) bought AT&T in 2005.
In the recent bio of William Fox "The Man who Made the Movies", the author says in spite of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the govt. had limited ability to break up monopolies or control them. Anybody trying to break into a business faced unfair competition or had to pay money to the right people to get a piece of the pie.
Western Electric was owned by AT&T until 1995 when the rights and intellectual property were sold
to a man who nows owns the Western Electric brand name. The company manufactures certain
Western Electric vacuum tubes and audio equipment.
What about Comcast
you not mentioned AT&T bell labs
I feel like since they got rid of Randall Stephenson as CEO and replaced them with the current guy (don't know the name off the top of my head) they seem to be getting back on track. Focusing on what their business is actually about, telecommunications. Not media. Biggest mistake AT&T has made in recent years IMO is the crazy amount of money they spent buying DirecTV when cord cutting was not only already a well-known and popular thing but accelerating as a trend. Go figure they end up selling/spinning it off as best they can (not hard to imagine they would have trouble finding someone interested). That $67 billion would have been FAR better spent going towards expanding the availability of AT&T Fiber. But I do think the new CEO gets it. After he took over, they started the process of selling off / spinning off Turner media, DTV etc. And have been far more focused on expanding AT&T Fiber on the wireline side and of course upgrades to the wireless network. They have been doing a pretty good job so far, adding 2.5+ million new service locations in 2021 and 2022 with the goal to offer the service to 30 million customer locations by 2025. I live in Hot Springs, Arkansas (population ~32,000-34,000) and I have seen contractors out running fiber like crazy for AT&T. They actually just started the process of upgrading our neighborhood from fiber to the node (what used to be called U-verse) which we currently get 100/20 from to AT&T Fiber. Can't wait to upgrade!
I think starlink spells the end of AT&T. Just look at what snapdragon showed off at CES this year satellite link capabilities on smartphones, and iPhone already did that last year. This will only get better
Nope. Starlink solves a completely different problem. it is for far off places where laying a cable is not financially sustainable. Fiber is still far superior than starlink when it comes to places with good density of users.
I feel like at this point att is just a front for the NSA. Thats why it doesnt matter how much debt they are in, the NSA needs att to stay alive to keep themselves operational
Even in India the telecom had massive debt
And thanks to reliance who helped it even grow more by becoming oil to telecom company and giving 1gbday data for free for almost a year