Opinions please. How likely a scenario to see At&t sell its wireline assets like Verizon did ? Who would buy ? Frontier is broke. Maybe google , amazon? Maybe no one buys. I imagine more likely it would be purchased by a well funded group of private investors. A venture fund of some kind. I think most of us field employees are in trouble long term. At&t clearly wants to get out of the business of rolling a truck. It wants to be like Apple: a cloud based services company and a wireless company.
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What is considered wireline? The fiber that is being put in all over or the copper they are putting bandages on. When the executives mention the word wireline these days, they are talking fiber infrastructure. Copper is a necessary evil right now.
Maybe Mastech will buy it?
Those of you saying T won’t sell the wireline because it’s needed for the wireless network are making a jump that you just can’t make. If they were to sell the wireline side of the company that doesn’t make it suddenly non-existent. The network would still be there and could thus be used as it is today. It would just be operated by someone else. This would be no different than the selling of all the towers T owned. They are still used, just leased back from the new owner.
Saying they can’t find a buyer may be a valid point, but saying they need to own it in order to run the wireless network is just not accurate.
"...aging copper facilities in the rural areas..."....copper $ux everywhere....nothing says classy like a bypasser strung out through the front door of the CO.
A lot of our copper cable is brand new....ive been stringing it out of the boxes 4 pairs at a time for a while now. The stock should be going through the roof now.
I still worked for Verizon when they shed off the former GTE wireline areas to Frontier. We marveled that anyone would even consider buying a landline/wireline service that had gone from a 95% household presence to as low as 15%.
We referred to Frontier as a "crypt-keeper" company. Buying dated technology, waiting until the last little old lady in America with a landline dies off, then sell the whole operation for sc-ap metal pricing.
If T wanted out of that business, they should have sold it 10 years ago when there might have been a buyer.
Just like streaming - want to be Netflix, then T should have started in 2009.
Based on what we have seen, nothing can be ruled out.
Remember, we need to “cut costs and pay down debt.”
Anything is possible.
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Clearly you don’t have a good understanding of how this entire network operates. No wireline, no network.”
Agreed. OP clearly has little knowledge of the core network outside of the local loop.
Actually I worked on team that did a study in multiple rural areas and we found that over 90% of the cable and service drops were not working. In many cases we found miles of cable and dead drops with only one or two working POTS lines. Also important to note that T has been filing to be released as carrier of last resort in many states for years now.
The majority of rural wire centers are served by cell phones and satellite dishes.
We actually lose subscribers every day in rural areas as customers disconnect landlines, relying on wireless.
You are correct that our coverage is spotty in rural area, unfortunately we also lose customers to competition like Verizon with a larger coverage area.
I’ll admit a generation of a certain age still holds onto that landline but that can’t last forever. At some point the only service option in rural America will be your cell phone.
Just look at Verizon's wireline we are trailing behind them is downsizing. Now we have 30 techs to a whole 100 mile radius decided I to several work centers. Verizon has 5 techs covering the whole area and doing co work, one manager to handle a whole side of a state. Engineering abandoning facilities where cables get damaged and only a hand full of workers on them and then just saying they no longer have service and offer them wireless. Verizon let the services suffer and subscriber count dwiddle and surplus as needed for the diminishing subscriber rate until it gets down to a skeleton crew just maintaining. I think this is at&t's idea. Then concentrate on other services such as wireless and fiber in metro.
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Clearly you don’t have a good understanding of how this entire network operates. No wireline, no network.
If it could find any buyers, it would have sold wireline a long time ago. Too many regulatory entanglements to be a viable option.
"It’s more likely that at some point down the line T simply abandons and or systematically takes down a large portion of rural facilities, including aging poles and copper cable with little to no working service." ????
No working service? Actually the rural areas probably have the highest percentage of dial tone because they cant get anything. else and cell is spotty
Verizon did NOT sell its wireline. It sold off some of those original GTE areas . Still have their original areas.
Why spend X dollars to buy a wireline service area with all the draw backs when I can spend the same X dollars on a new fiber overbuild in the select areas I see as profitable?
T will not sell off wireline assets for couple reasons
#1 No one would buy the rural facilities due to the over all condition of aging facilities and rapidly changing technology
#2 In an urban setting T wouldn’t want to give up the competitive advantage of owning infrastructure
#3 T needs wireline poles, fiber and office equipment to not only provide existing fiber to the business and cell sites but maybe more importantly for the 5G build out
It’s more likely that at some point down the line T simply abandons and or systematically takes down a large portion of rural facilities, including aging poles and copper cable with little to no working service.
With the majority of rural facilities well past depreciation there would be no tax incentive for anyone. The poles are undersized for power company needs and the cost to upgrade, repair and maintain would be astronomical.
Randall and Stanky would like nothing more than spinning off wireline so they can focus on their movie careers. The problem is that unlike DTV, they haven't finished completely destroying the value of wireline so they can sell it for a tiny fraction of its original worth.
I've always seen chances of AT&T selling or divesting some services. On phone, they have traditional home phone, uverse phone, wireless home phone, and cell phones.
On television, they have DirectTV satellite and Uverse TV.
On internet, they have wired/fiber internet and wireless internet. 5G may make fixed wireless feasible.
So, they have duplicate offerings, where sale of one product cannibalizes sales of another product. That's a recipe to sell some of the duplicates.
They will not sell core wireline assets. They control everything from the content, to final delivery of that content. They do have some areas they could flush out,however most should and will stay. Oh and also they have alot of high paying business customers inside those assets.
They won’t do any of the Elliott recommended stuff unless Randy goes. Otherwise it would be the board admitting failure and lack of oversight of Randy’s bad decisions. Since they have a fiduciary responsibility, that could expose the board members to class action litigation by shareholders.
Interesting concept. But the physical network environment allows them to do much of the other “stuff”.