Seidenberg built Verizon out of the reassembly of several other regional Bell operating companies–New England Telephone, New York Telephone, and Bell Atlantic with independents GTE and MCI, along with the U.S. Verizon happily stepped into this void under its legendary former CEO Ivan Seidenberg–and its Verizon FiOS fiber-optic became the industry gold standard for years while AT&T languished. In lieu of genuine infrastructure improvements, AT&T fell back on marketing: labeling 4G as 5G (for which it was explicitly sanctioned) while mocking other (successful) technological leaps, such as extending fiber optic cables to communities. That label, as competitors and GM employees are keenly aware, was code for one thing: “GM is a failure.” Costly distractions: Holding the phone on 5G owned: “So long as TARP money is wrapped up in GM, the company will never shake its “Government Motors” image. government’s TARP program invested $50 billion to bail out GM from bankruptcy, Whitacre chafed at the 26.5% the U.S. Whitacre later engineered his post-retirement mission by leaving the GM board to seize the CEO job, having undermined humble internal GM incumbent Fritz Henderson, who led them out of bankruptcy. This was ironic as Whitacre, who was dubbed by some “the whiner” of the telecom industry for his solicitation of government resources to build out infrastructure while Verizon and T-Mobile raced ahead on this front, in a later role resented government involvement. With the 1982 antitrust breakup up of the AT&T monopoly, AT&T was divested into seven regional Bell operating companies, in addition to the parent company’s technology and longlines business. All costs of aggressive, uncontrolled competition are eventually borne, directly or indirectly, by the public,” even Vail’s own annual AT&T reports warned. “In the long run … the public as a whole has never benefited by destructive competition. With assistance from the government, the Bell Telephone Company became a monopoly, vanquishing most of its hundreds of rivals. By the time he retired 45 years later, Vail had built it into the world’s largest corporation. For historical clarity, it is important to appreciate that the AT&T of today is not the company that Theodore Vail founded in 1878 as the general manager of the Bell Telephone Company that commercialized Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. For whom the bell tolled: The roots of chronic underinvestment The divergent paths of these three largest telecoms giants are a reminder of the power of investing in infrastructure and quality of customer experience. How we got to this point is largely a tale of three companies–since over the last decade, the market capitalization of AT&T and Verizon stock have both diminished by tens of billions while T-Mobile shares have grown by 10 times, with the latest plunges in AT&T and Verizon exacerbating the massive transfer of shareholder value, market share, and customers to T-Mobile.
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