Tag Archives: AT&T

Monopsony in the Wireless Labor Market

NATE, the Communications Contractors Association, recently sponsored a report by the Brattle Group titled Market Failure in the Wireless Communications Infrastructure Service Industry. The report describes how the three national mobile networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) dominate the labor market for wireless contractors in a way that is undermining the development and retention of the workforce for this critical infrastructure.

The Brattle report calls the situation a monopsony. That is an economic term for a market where a buyer, or a small universe of buyers, has significant market power over vendors who serve the industry. Brattle believes the term applies since the three big cellular carriers collectively control 97% of the cellular market. The contractor market that sells labor to the carriers is comprised of numerous small companies.

The Brattle report describes how the three carriers collectively harm the contractor industry. The three carriers dictate the prices they are willing to pay for service. Contractors complain that the prices offered don’t account for local issues like labor rates, terrain, and weather. 80% of the contractors that responded to a Brattle survey say that prices offered by the carriers don’t cover their costs. The rates don’t cover costs like warehousing of materials, third-party compliance, or training costs for technicians.

The report also shows some interesting graphs that show that the carriers are slow to pay, further adding to the cost of working with them. They have charts that contrast the carriers and show that Verizon pays 75% of invoices within 30 days, while T-Mobile only pays 17%, and AT&T pays 15%. AT&T doesn’t pay more than 45% of its invoices for more than 60 days. Slow payments put a lot of pressure on contractors that must meet payrolls.

The behavior of the carriers is having a big impact on the contractor industry. 54% have downsized during the past three years. A lot of contractors have exited the market and are looking for work outside the cellular market. Attrition of knowledgeable technicians is killing institutional knowledge. The contractors fear that they won’t be able to respond to emergencies or support any effort in a few years to deploy 6G networks.

The Brattle report does not accuse the three big carriers of collusion but says that the desire of each to drive down operating costs is having the same impact as if they were colluding. The report warns that the industry is seeing a noticeable decline in institutional capacity. It takes time and on-the-job experience to train tower climbers – this is not a position that can be quickly ramped up. They warn that loss of experienced tower climbers is not only a concern for the industry but is a national security concern.

The report makes an interesting comparison to another monopsony industry, the companies that build airplanes. The airline industry has learned that it is most efficient if it pays enough to keep experienced workers, because that significantly reduces the time needed to build a new airplane.

The report believes that corrective action is needed. Brattle doesn’t know the best way to fix the problem, which could be done through policy, regulation, or the carriers deciding to change their practices.

This situation is a big contrast to the fiber construction industry because there are hundreds of companies building fiber, which creates significant competition to find a contractor for a project. However, there is a danger after the big spending on grants is completed that the number of companies building new fiber networks will shrink to be similar to the wireless industry.

Big Company Culture

AT&T CEO John Stankey wrote a lengthy memo to all company managers as a follow-up to a company-wide employee survey. AT&T is in the midst of an internal transformation. At the beginning of the year, AT&T mandated that all employees report to the office five days per week. The company is also pursuing an aggressive plan to reduce the number of work locations for white-collar workers to a smaller number of key hubs.

The memo included some blunt messages for employees. One of the key messages is the end of the concept of company loyalty. This is extraordinary for a corporation that historically put employees first. AT&T historically took pride from always promoting from within and that a lineman might someday become the CEO. The memo bluntly points out that “Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an ’employment deal’ rooted in loyalty . . . We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements.”

Stankey also stressed that the company culture is shifting to put customers and change first. He said it is important for employees to know what they can expect from the company, and that employees deserve the proper tools to succeed – a clear career path, a functional office environment, and good IT systems – and said the company is working hard to provide these.

But the memo warns that employees who aren’t aligned with the company’s focus should look elsewhere. For example, the memo says, “ if a self-directed, virtual, or hybrid work schedule is essential for you to manage your career aspirations and life challenges, you will have a difficult time aligning your priorities with those of the company and the culture we aim to establish. . . If the requirements dictated by this dynamic do not align to your personal desires, you have every right to find a career opportunity that is suitable to your aspirations and needs.”

You can read the entire internal email at the bottom of this article from Business Insider. It’s worth reading because it says a whole lot more than the few things I’ve cited in this blog.

It’s quite an extraordinary memo because it harkens back to a time when most large American corporations were like this, always putting the needs of the company above the needs of employees. But in the 60s and 70s, AT&T was the antithesis of the typical large corporation. AT&T had a compact with employees that they would have a job as long as they worked hard and made sure that customers were happy. When I worked at pre-divestiture AT&T, it was not unusual to be working with employees with twenty or thirty years at the company. But what was most extraordinary at the company was the degree to which most employees were extremely loyal to the company.

What I find most interesting about this shift at AT&T is that the company is running counter to trends in the workforce. Millennial and Gen-Z employees are, as a whole, more interested in work/life balance than in being a cog in a large company. A significant percentage of employees today will take less pay to be able to work from home at least a few days per week. Younger employees feel like they can develop peer relationships through electronic tools rather than by sitting in live meetings.

Will AT&T and other corporations with company-first policies be able to attract new employees over the coming decades, or will the company have to eventually adapt to the realities of the workforce? It’s not hard to imagine that the word is already getting out on social media that AT&T isn’t a place anybody wants to work. Even when AT&T finds new employees, will they stay? By telling employees that the company is not loyal to them, AT&T can’t expect employees to be loyal to the company, its goals, or its culture.

This new AT&T culture is starkly different than the culture at most smaller ISPs. I work with a lot of ISPs that value employees and keep them onboard through retirement. I’ve always thought this is the reason that small companies do so well when competing against the giant ISPs – customers can see the difference in the way the company values its employees and customers.

A Converged Carrier Market?

T-Mobile made financial news recently when a KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst downgraded the long-term outlook for T-Mobile stock and said the company is “underweight”. Press coverage quoted the analyst saying, “We think [T-Mobile] is fiber deficient in a converged/bundled world”.

We’ve been headed towards the industry that is dominated by a handful of converged telecom providers, and the comments from this analyst show that day is probably here. The analyst’s comments come from comparing T-Mobile with the other giant converged companies that offer broadband and wireless, specifically AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter/Cox.

It’s curious why the analyst dinged T-Mobile because the company is profitable and successful. In the latest financial report for the second quarter of 2025, the company reported $17.4 billion in customer revenues, up 6% year-over-year. Net income was $3.2 billion, the highest-ever for the company and up 10% year-over-year. Net cash from operations was $7 billion, up 27% year-over-year. Adjusted free cash flow was $4.6 billion, up 4% year-over-year.

T-Mobile was criticized because the analyst believes that the most successful big companies will be those that lock up customers with a bundle of broadband and wireless. That seems to mean that the companies with the most gigabit passings will be the ultimate winners in the market. T-Mobile is expected to have about 15 million fiber passings by 2030. That pales behind the 50 million passings expected by Verizon by 2020 or the 60 million planned by AT&T by 2023. Charter passes 57 million homes today and will be adding 7 million homes when it closes on the merger with Cox. Comcast says it will have 62.5 million passings by 2023. T-Mobile will clearly have the smallest fiber footprint.

How are the other big four converged companies doing with bundling? Comcast had 8.5 million cellular customers at the end of 2Q 2025 compared to 31.4 million broadband households. Charter had 10.9 million cellular customers compared to 29.9 million broadband households. AT&T reported for 2Q 2025 that 40% of its fiber customers are buying cellular. I can’t find where Verizon highlights the percentage of homes that buy cellular and broadband.

So this year, the stock market doesn’t seem to be valuing the converged carriers evenly. As I wrote this blog, T-Mobile stock was up 19% for the year. Comcast stock is down 11% for the year and Charter is down 22%. Verizon stock is up 6% and AT&T is up 20%. There is a story behind all of the stock price changes, and it mostly involves changes in customers and earnings, not in the percentage of convergence.

One thing is clear. These five companies dominate the telecommunications space. The five companies have most of the cellular customers in the country, and T-Mobile will be adding customers from the USCellular purchase. The five companies had over 98 million broadband customers at the end of the second quarter of 2025, and Charter will be adding 6-7 million more customers if the merger with Cox is approved. The five companies account for almost all of the national net growth of broadband customers.

The KeyBank analyst was looking at the long-term trajectory of T-Mobile compared to the other giant companies. The analysis statement seems to assume that FWA growth will eventually top out and decline in competition with the other big carriers. But for now, in the second quarter, T-Mobile had the biggest growth in both cellular and broadband customers. It’s obvious that T-Mobile has something today that customers value. My crystal ball is not clear enough to be able to predict that T-Mobile is going to stop growing any time soon, and it seems too early to predict that T-Mobile won’t be in the same category as the other four converged companies.

A Peek at the New BEAD

The State of Tennessee released a side-by-side comparison of the new Benefit of the Bargain round of BEAD applications compared to its initial round of BEAD applications conducted before the revised BEAD rules.

The side-by-side comparison (file:///C:/A/Articles/Tennessee-BEAD-Comparison.pdf) is interesting and shows some big differences between the two grant rounds:

  • Tennessee received 541 applications in the new Benefit of the Bargain round compared to 298 applications in the original round of BEAD.
  • The low-orbit satellite companies Starlink and Kuiper bid throughout the state. Starlink didn’t submit any applications in the first round but bid almost everywhere in the new BEAD round. Kuiper bid for most of the state in both BEAD rounds. Satellite is clearly going to win a significant amount of grant funding since there were 68 of 173 serving areas that got proposals from one or both satellite providers and no other technology. The satellite companies surprisingly don’t seem to be fazed by bidding in Appalachia.
  • There were surprisingly few proposals for fixed wireless technology, with proposals only made in 12 of the 173 study areas included in the new round of BEAD. Part of the reason for this might be the mountainous and hilly nature of much of Tennessee, but there are plenty of areas in the central and western parts of the state where wireless will work well.
  • Comcast switched technology from the first to the second round. In the first round, the company proposed to build fiber, and in the new round it mostly changed to traditional hybrid fiber/coaxial networks – apparently to be able to bid at a lower cost. This makes me wonder if it’s really cheaper to build copper coaxial cables than fiber or if Comcast is just willing to take less funding.
  • There has always been a big question of whether big ISPs would show up for BEAD. There are three big companies in the new round of BEAD – AT&T, Comcast, and Windstream. The industry has always wondered if AT&T would join BEAD.
  • There are a number of smaller ISPs asking for funding to build fiber that includes cooperatives and municipalities.
  • There are four service areas that had no proposals. The state will have to talk an ISP into serving these areas before they can close out their BEAD grants.

It’s impossible to make any definitive cost comparisons between applicants because the new BEAD rules allow ISPs to request to serve areas smaller than the serving areas suggested by the state. There are also roughly 7,000 fewer passings on the newest BEAD map than were included in the initial BEAD grants. But in general, the comparison shows:

  • Most companies proposing to build fiber bid less the second time, but some of this could be due to fewer eligible passings and not just to a sharpening of the pencil.
  • Fiber ISPs across the country are wondering how much lower other technologies will bid in BEAD. There is only a single company asking to build wireless in the state, and their proposed grant awards are roughly one-third the cost of those asking for fiber in the same study areas. But without knowing more details, that ratio might not mean anything for other states.
  • However, satellite bids are incredibly low, most at 10% or less than proposals to build fiber. There is a map showing the eligible passings by study area, and I eyeball the satellite bids to be in the range of $400- $600 per passing. Kuiper is generally significantly lower than Starlink. These low bids are going to worry ISPs everywhere.

 

Closing Copper Networks

In a precursor to the headlines we’ll be seeing in the U.S., Telefónica announced on May 27 that it shut off its copper telephone network in Spain. Telefónica today has $41 billion in revenues that include broadband, voice, and cellular business. The company was the legacy monopoly telephone company in Spain, founded in 1924, and still serves a major share of the telecom market.

The company began replacing copper with fiber in 2009 in reaction to a European Union order to unbundle copper networks to allow competition – an order that did not apply to fiber. Closing the copper networks also means the wholesale business has ended for companies that were using unbundled copper access.

The company was able to decommission the first two of its 8,500 exchanges in 2014, and the pace has accelerated since then, with 4,300 exchanges shut in 2024. Telefónica claims to be the first telephone company in Europe to have completed the transition from copper to fiber.

Unlike here, the European Union has strong rules that insist that every dropped copper customer has access to another source of broadband and voice – mostly fiber, but also wireless. The EU allows remote locations to be transitioned to satellite broadband. In the U.S., telcos are supposed to find an alternative for customers but often just wink at the requirement.

AT&T made a formal announcement in January of this year that it intends to get rid of copper everywhere except California by the end of 2029. The company has been quietly decommissioning copper long before that formal announcement. AT&T will likely have a prolonged battle with the California Public Service Commission before it can tear down copper.

AT&T said in its announcement that it will offer an alternate technology to customers – either fiber or wireless. AT&T announced plans at the end of last year to build 45 million additional fiber passings on the same 2029 deadline as killing copper. Cities are anxiously waiting to see if AT&T will really build fiber in the poorest neighborhoods and in places where fiber construction is very expensive. It seems more likely that the company will get 80% fiber coverage in some cities and call it good.

Rural areas are another matter. In rural areas, AT&T will offer FWA cellular broadband as an alternative to copper. But FWA technology has two major shortcomings in rural areas. First, there is zero cellular coverage in huge parts of rural America, and even less coverage when you account for FWA customers needing to be within a few miles of a cell tower. Even close to a cell tower, there is always the question if a given tower has the capacity to accept a lot of new FWA customers. There are already stories in the press of rural customers losing copper coverage with no wireless alternative.

The FCC recently changed rules to make it easier for legacy telcos to walk away from copper networks. These changes were adopted by the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, meaning they didn’t come to the full Commission for a vote.

One rule change allows a telco to turn off copper wires without having to conduct a test to first see if a replacement technology can take over the functions that were being performed by copper. This rule clarification says a telco can justify tearing down the old network if the “totality of the circumstances” proves that the change is needed. That seems to provide justification for tearing down copper as long as some adequate number of homes in an area will have a replacement.

Another rule change puts a two-year moratorium on telcos for having to disclose and seek public comment about closing copper networks.

Of course, to speed things along even faster, there is a good chance that all rules pertaining to copper networks will be scrapped during the Delete, Delete, Delete process.

Battle for CBRS Spectrum

There is a huge battle brewing at the FCC over the use of CBRS spectrum. The pieces are starting to fall in place to possibly auction the spectrum for use by cellular carriers.

The idea of putting the spectrum up for auction has been discussed for several years, but the topic went into high gear last year when AT&T asked the FCC to open a formal docket to explore the idea. AT&T’s request was opposed by a diverse set of industry stakeholders, and the FCC didn’t take any action on the AT&T request.

One of the stumbling blocks to the AT&T request is that this spectrum is used by the military, primarily by the Navy. The Department of Defense just removed that hurdle and is circulating a spectrum plan where it would relocated its functions being handled by CBRS spectrum to the 3.1-3.4 GHz band.

The other new change is that Congress now seems gung-ho to reauthorize FCC spectrum auctions as a way to meet budget goals. During newly-passed House version of the new budget is an assumption that new spectrum auctions will be able to raise $88 billion. That claim seems high since the FCC has only raised a total of $233 billion from spectrum auctions since the process began in 1991.

For a new spectrum auction to raise a lot of money, a lot of spectrum has to be made available. The DoD proposal has the military freeing up 640 MHz of spectrum, including freeing up use in 1300-1350 MHz, 1780-1850 MHz, 5850-5925 MHz, and 7125-7250 MHz. DoD also proposes that the FCC clear 220 MHz in the upper C-band for auction. The FCC has already been considering auctioning off the AWS-3 spectrum bands that include 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz, and 2155-2180 MHz.

If the FCC goes along with AT&T’s and DoD’s proposed plans, it will be a huge windfall for cellular carriers over other spectrum users. CBRS spectrum is used today for a wide variety of functions, including rural broadband, manufacturing, industrial and enterprise private networks, transportation and logistics connectivity, and school and library access. I wrote a recent blog about how John Deere was using the spectrum to create a private network for its factories in Illinois and Iowa.

A spectrum auction would require the auction winner to fund existing users to relocate to another spectrum band, but doing so is disruptive, and in many cases would not result in a one-for-one functional swap.

The FCC would also be setting a new precedent by relocating CBRS spectrum users who won the use of the spectrum in the last few years. For the FCC to change its mind about the spectrum should make any spectrum winner nervous that the FCC won’t defend existing spectrum licenses.

Anybody who has been following the industry has noticed a big uptick in discussions about how the U.S. is again losing the 5G battle to the Chinese. I’ve never found anybody able to tell me what that means, and the last time this language was used was part of a ploy by carriers to put pressure on the FCC to hold more spectrum auctions. It looks like history is repeating itself.

The most interesting thing about these spectrum battles is that the cellular carriers mostly want more spectrum to be able to compete for home broadband service. I think we should be having the policy discussion if that is in the long-run national interest. It makes sense to deploy unused spectrum in rural areas to provide broadband in places where people don’t invest in fiber networks. But spectrum is a limited resource, and I think it’s a valid question to ask if we should be using valuable spectrum to bring a third competitor to urban markets that already have fiber and cable ISPs. I went back and reviewed the original goals for 5G, and competing for home broadband was never mentioned as a goal.

Broadband Trajectories

For most the dozen years I’ve been writing this blog, the biggest cable companies accounted for almost all of the growth in broadband customers. Quarter after quarter, and year after year, the big cable companies were the source of almost all new net broadband customers.

This started to shift a few years ago when FWA cellular home broadband from T-Mobile, Verizon, and more recently, AT&T entered the scene. For the last couple of years, almost all of the net broadband growth in the country came from the FWA technology and these three carriers.

It’s clear that we’re now entering a new stage the industry where cable broadband losses are accelerating, where FWA growth hasn’t slowed, and where the big telcos are growing again because of their expansion of fiber.

Consider the following statistics that show the net change in broadband customers over the last year, and for the latest quarter, for the largest cable companies, largest telcos, and FWA carriers. There are a few big companies missing from this comparison like Cox, Mediacom, and Windstream, since those companies are privately held and don’t publicly report customer counts.

These numbers show that telcos other than Lumen are growing again. The numbers for telcos don’t tell the whole story because net customer changes in the table include both DSL losses and fiber gains. For example, during the last year, AT&T added over 1 million customers to fiber.

These trajectories don’t bode well for the big cable companies. There were a lot of predictions made last year that FWA growth would slow down, and that doesn’t seem to be the case yet in 2025. The telcos are all picking up steam in terms of adding fiber customers. It’s going to be interesting over the coming years to see how the biggest cable companies fare in battling everybody else. Charter has decided to fight the trend through the merger with Cox. We’ll have to wait and see what the rest have in mind.

FCC Loses the Ability to Levy Fines

On April 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the FCC doesn’t have the authority to levy fines. The case under appeal came from an AT&T fine issued by the FCC in 2024 against the company for violating customer privacy by selling customer location data. AT&T appealed the FCC ruling and said that the FCC had violated the Seventh Amendment of the Constitution by not allowing AT&T to have a jury trial.

The Fifth Circuit sided with the AT&T appeal and said that the FCC had acted as prosecutor, judge, and jury in deciding that AT&T had broken the rules and in setting the fine.

The Court ruling was not particularly kind to AT&T and is worth a read. The Court recounted the facts of the case and said that AT&T was, at a minimum, guilty of negligence since it assumed that those who purchased its location data would protect consumer’s privacy rights.

The Court’s opinion relies in the 2023 Supreme Court Decision in SEC v Jarkesy that ruled that the SEC had no authority to levy civil fines. Since then, many lawyers have assumed that the ruling would apply broadly to all federal agencies, and this ruling affirms that opinion. The two cases together seem to affirm the inability of federal agencies to fine the companies they regulate.

This ruling will stand unless the FCC appeals it. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and Commissioner Nathan Simington both objected to the original fines against AT&T. However, the FCC has issued fines since 2023 against others, including a $4.5 million fine levied this year against Telnyx LLC related to making imposter robocalls leading up to last year’s elections. The FCC already wrote a letter to other courts that are reviewing cases involving FCC fines and asked those courts not automatically follow this decision.

The case also brought into question the process by which the FCC decides that its rules have been broken. The Court found that the FCC had essentially judged AT&T as guilty without giving the company the chance to defend itself. This might mean that the FCC and other regulatory agencies will be limited to gathering facts and forwarding cases to the DOJ without making any findings of wrongdoing. I don’t want this to sound like an overexaggeration but that philosophy seems like it would largely take the FCC out of the regulatory business. It would mean that the agency can set rules but can’t decide that a regulated company has broken its rules, since doing so would be a finding of wrongdoing without a trial.

I’m not a lawyer, and there are nuances to this ruling that I am probably missing. But this doesn’t seem to bode well for the FCC and many other regulatory agencies. The ruling would seem to curtail the ability of Chairman Carr to pursue a lot of the topics on his 2025 wish list.

AI Hype Begins

It didn’t take long after the widespread introduction of AI into the business environment for a carrier to claim it is using AI better than the competition. Masha Abarinova wrote an article in Fierce Networks that quotes Comcast as saying it is using AI more effectively than its fiber competitors.

The article covers a discussion with Elad Nafshi, the chief network officer for Comcast, who brags on the ways Comcast is already using AI more effectively than fiber-based ISPs. She quotes Nashi as claiming that Comcast has embedded AI that is “literally feet away from a customer” with real-time pattern detection capabilities that give Comcast the ability to pinpoint interference in the network.

I can already anticipate the fiber ISP retort to this claim, with fiber ISPs saying they don’t need a last-foot AI capability because fiber doesn’t have any interference since it has the same quality of service from end-to-end in the network.

I’ve been waiting for this first shot across the bow and suspect that Comcast’s claim will set off a chain of industry players claiming their flavor of AI is better than the competition. These claims are mostly hype and are aimed at Wall Street analysts and not at the general public. The biggest companies in the industry never miss a chance to claim they have an advantage. It’s easy at this early stage of AI to make this kind of claim since nobody can tell how much of such a claim is hype versus reality. Throw around enough buzzwords, and nobody can challenge such a claim.

A more interesting observation in the article quotes Nafshi as saying that general AI use among customers has not resulted in increased network traffic. He noted that while customers are using ChatGPT and OpenAI, the interactions between customers and the clouds are mostly passing text, which is not data intensive.

This differs a lot from what other industry players have been claiming about the future of AI. The article cites AT&T’s prediction that its network traffic will double by 2028 due to AI. Zayo cited an expected huge growth in network traffic as the justification to buy the fiber networks from Crown Castle.

I’ve been scratching my head for several months trying to figure out how AI might create the predicted explosive growth. I’ve yet to see anybody describe the specific AI traffic or functions that could double the traffic for a company like AT&T.

Network traffic is growing for other reasons. Ericsson recently predicted a 16% annual growth in cellular traffic. Numerous predictions for home and business broadband have predicted growth rates of 10-12% annually. Something drastic and new would be needed to double overall traffic on AT&T by 2028.

The Big Carrier Chess Board

There was big news in the long-haul fiber business recently when Zayo announced it will be acquiring the fiber assets of Crown Castle and adding 90,000 miles of fiber to its network. The acquisition will also Zayo’s access to major buildings to 70,000. Zayo says the acquisition will position it as a major player in providing transport for AI. Zayo has been actively building new fiber routes across the country in the last few years.

Crown Castle is also selling its small cell business to EQT, a major investor in Zayo. The announced cost of the fiber acquisition is reported at $4.25 billion. My back-of-the-envelope math says that is paying $47,000 dollars per route mile for long-haul fiber. That seems like a huge bargain. Here is the map of the Crown Castle network. The map doesn’t show the many local routes within metropolitan areas.

There have been rumors that Crown Castle hasn’t been doing well, with its slowdown based on the decision of cellular carriers to expand via small cell sites. Crown Castle made a major bet that small cell sites was going to be a thriving business. That didn’t sound like a bad bet based on the rhetoric of the big cellular carriers a few years ago – but the expansion to small cell sites ceased abruptly.

This will cause a big shift in the large carrier market. Vertical Systems Group tracks the large carrier market. For 2024 they rank the leasers in that market as 1-Luman, 2-Zayo, 3-Verizon, 4-AT&T, and 5-Crown Castle. Each of these business has at least a 4% market share in selling fiber  wavelengths. We’ll have to see if the acquisition bumps Zayo to number one.

Zayo was ranked seventh in connections to lit buildings, with Crown Castle listed at eighth. One has to thin this might move Zayo ahead of number six Cox, or number five Lumen.

Lumen is also in the news. It’s widely reported in the press that AT&T is going to make a $5.5 billion bid for Lumen’s retail fiber business. This deal is far from over, and AT&T hasn’t even made a formal offer yet. There are already rumors that T-Mobile, Verizon, and BCE (the Canadian company that recently purchased Ziply Fiber) might make counteroffers.

Interestingly, analysts are saying that an AT&T bid for Lumen’s fiber customers is as much about reducing cell phone churn as it is in acquiring fiber customers. However, if AT&T is successful in buying Lumen, they would grow to 55 million fiber passings, compared to 35 million for Verizon and 12 million for T-Mobile.

Verizon will be growing it’s footprint and is expected to close the acquisition of Frontier sometime this year. T-Mobile has also been active in fiber acquisitions and purchased a share of Lumos and Metronet last year and is partnering with two ISPs in Louisiana that are pursuing BEAD grants.

There are lots of other rumors in the industry, with the biggest being that T-Mobile is interested in buying Charter, which has over 30 million broadband customers.

It’s clearly going to be an interesting year watching the big companies move pieced around the chess board.