All very good questions, FR1, but I'd only be speculating on each of them if I attempted to answer them.
My gut tells me that whenever a merger or consolidation of this scale occurs, incentives to improve or expand infrastructure decrease by some measure. Stated another way, the larger and more dominant the resulting player emerges, the less responsive to calls for change they are, and the more lethargic they become. Like I said, just a gut.
Before they can grow and improve anything or announce any new technological initiatives that have not already been on the drawing boards, it would seem to me that they would first face the task of marrying both their access and hub architectures, not to mention their back ends (back-offices). These moves would be necessary in order to realize economies of scale _allowing them_ to reduce staff, thus helping them to justify the deal.
I noted those valuations that Armstrong cited, and I had to stop and wonder how much creative math went into them. To wit, a friend quipped to me via email, with some level of justification:
Clearly the infrastructure cost serving each of these customers is immaterial. For less than half that, including trenching, they could build a new ftth network from the ground up, to the same 13.6 million subscribers they are *buying* from ATT. Same customers that they are valuing the eyeballs so highly at, but with a brand-spanking new fiber to the home network with greater capabilities by far than what they are purchasing. They could probably give them all free service on the new network for a year and still come out ahead. |
