U.S. Telcos: How Competitive are They‪?‬

The U.S. telecoms market is entering a new era in which three somewhat more evenly-matched players are competing for the spoils. As they join forces, T-Mobile US and Sprint will finally mount a serious challenge to the long-standing hegemony of AT&T and Verizon. As this report shows, Sprint has been woefully uncompetitive as a standalone company.

A high-level guide to the financial state of U.S.’s top telcos, this study enables long-term investors and policymakers to easily track the progress of four telcos - AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US and Sprint - over the past five years on a range of financial metrics. 

With T-Mobile US and Sprint suffering from a lack of scale, AT&T and Verizon sought to diversify into content through eye-catching acquisitions that have brought major movie and TV companies, such as Time Warner, and Internet platforms, such as Yahoo!, into the ambit of the U.S. telecoms industry. Verizon has since retrenched, but AT&T’s expensive entertainment binge is still in play. 

As the U.S. looks to stay one step ahead of China in the development of artificial intelligence, it will need extensive IoT networks to collect real-world data.  That, in turn, will depend on telcos building out the fibre and 5G infrastructure that delivers the reliable and responsive connectivity required to remotely monitor and control assets. But are America's telcos investing enough?