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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

> institutional incompetence, or malice, or laziness.

AT&T in TN is an epic example of all 3 and then some. The most recent unbelievably stupid thing I've personally observed was the construction of 15 miles of new fiber on county power poles; right beside a Verizon fiber line that had been there for a decade. They put no slack loops in theirs, VZW's run has many.

that line went up this year, and has been torn down and out of service 3 times, so far, that I know of. Oddly I hear the VZW line keeps failing shortly after the ATT trucks are seen, where I dont recall hearing much about failures on the VZW before this year. So perhaps there was a design consideration that suggested the construction method.

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I can't speak for the telco side of the business, but I do know that AT&T leadership has been telling their enterprise IT side of the business to throw out many prior requirements to built HA into things, and to reduce the portion of systems set aside to handle unplanned events. One of the justifications has been that such planning and built-in headroom is virtually never used.

They are rapidly shutting down most of their enterprise IT data centers and the planning was done without consulting with their system architects about things like site paring for EBR and data replication, network coverage, etc.

ATT has more debt than the Phillipines, it's no surprise that they're trying to cut costs.

But what are their financing rates? They conceivably could have better long term security due to their position. And thus be fine with a higher debt loading. Utilities, at least those with a monopoly license, are quite close to State-owned-enterprise (SOEs).

You think they're going to pay off $168,000,000,000 of debt at the current rates? Maybe. If not, watch out.

Well if they have a monopoly in certain areas/sectors and the only alternative to raising prices is bankruptcy... I’m pretty sure they can raise prices arbitrarily.

That actually raises an interesting question, how are monopoly licenses valued? If their value can be bumped up every year on the balance sheet...

Why do they have so much debt? Aren't they profitable?

I'd expect they've got a LOT of baggage. They have the ex-SBC copper-wire networks they probably wish they could shed (compare when Verizon basically refused to rebuild damaged infrastructure after Hurricane Sandy). But they also went all-in on pay TV, buying DirecTV at a premium price just as cord-cutting became a thing.

I wonder if we'll eventually see an "Amtrak" style nationalization for our POTS and related infrastructure. The firms with nothing sexier in their portfolio (Frontier) are frequently unhealthy, and the ones that do have other things to sell (Verizon, AT&) don't give it their full attention. It's no longer a competitive commercial product, but it serves enough of a public interest (i. e. not breaking a billion POTS-attached alarms, the high resiliency in natural disasters) that it can't just be dug up and scrapped for copper.

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