Beginning to see some discord and dysfunction in the team ... John "colorful socks" Donovan alludes to John Stevens of stifling growth in the mobility side by restricting investment ( allocating for capacity expansion of 5MHz of spectrum at a time instead of more), he also admits that ATT has the highest ARPU ( means either they earn more or they cost less, judging from his long term strategy to bring costs down, it should probably be clear which it is) in the industry for video, so their plan is to catch cord cutters with Directv now and Watch TV which are very lean contributors or at best breakeven ( shifting them to lower value products is going to reduce earnings). Its counter intuitive to hike prices ( selectively targeting customers that use TV as an entertainment baby sitter will be charged more) and not expect that subs will increasingly switch / cut their cord entirely. He even says they are done launching satellites, so the bulk of the rural subs will be without service (its hard to provide broadband access to rural subs) in a few years. That would be an even more drop in earnings.
Stankey's opening during QA session about Trump Whitehouse standard "take the mike away from him ..", and Randall's immediate quip of "there goes another law suit!", John Donovan's responses to Stankeys's "he is calling me a rail" indicate a sense of frustration in the team.
CFO John " nervously fidgeting" Stephens never sounded so incredulous, it's almost like he does not even believe what he is saying .. they want to salvage 8B$ from their assets, stuff for which that they overpaid by atleast 200-300% (DTV and TW), 12 B$ from their free cash flow after dividends to pay down the 20B$ debt, they may very well do 2.5 times debt to EBITDA but it could backfire immediately after wards because all these extra earnings will come from existing subscribers with existing services and they probably will not see much value increase, so it would seem improbable if subscribers can remain asleep during this gradual extortion and if shareholders can remain indifferent to the dilution of their stock's value. In a couple of years, starting in 2020, after all their strategies play out, the fate of ATT will be clear. It's highly unlikely that the company can regain the glory when 1 in 1000 worked for the "phone" company and most of the employees prided themselves in designing and deploying technologies to connect people even in the nooks and corners of the country and the world at large, economically and reliably.