The post-BellSouth merger AT&T is going to be one honking company…. but do you know how big? It will control 22% of all consumer dollars spent on telecom services (including video services) and 34% of dollars spent in the business market. Yeah… that big, according to a study by TNS Telecom, a telecom consulting group. The study points out that after the deal is closed, three of the nation’s top telecom providers – AT&T, Verizon and Comcast – will control 49% of the total consumer market and in the business market AT&T and Verizon will represent 55% of spending. The funny thing is that they are not even calculating the future scenarios… but clearly the big are getting bigger, if not better 😉
How does it stack up internationally? Folks at Telegeography crunched some numbers and says while the company would be the largest in the US, it would be the third largest behind China Telecom and China Netcom; ninth largest wireless operator behind multinational groups such as Vodafone and would have only one-third of the broadband subscriber base of China Telecom. Further, in terms of revenue, the new AT&T’s $69.4 billion in 2005 revenues are far from Japanese giant NTT that raked in $99.9 billion.
Speaking of the merger, I was just catching up with digg and saw this from last week:
http://telephonyonline.com/iptv/news/BellSouthVODcosts_030706/
(from http://www.digg.com/technology/AverageUser:2GBmonth,CostingBellSouth_$1 discussion)
“The average IPTV user will likely consume about 224 gigabytes per month, he added, at a monthly cost to carriers of $112, a giant leap from the less than $5 attributed to Internet use. If that content were high-definition video, the average user would be consuming more than 1 terabyte per month at a cost to carriers of $560 per month.
“Clearly that’s not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service,” [BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry] Kafka said. “That’s why we need help.”
What’s new? More lies from the Bells. This is a farce — they promise more for less after their merger, but that’s clearly not what the consumer’s going to get. Rather than more for less, this will end up being more for MUCH, MUCH more. AT&T was claiming to go bring more video in to the BellSouth region, but here’s BellSouth’s Chief Architect saying it’s not cost effective or scalable.
I don’t know if I buy into all the worry. The telephony market can’t be categorized as it was. It’s now part of a much bigger communication smarket where these folks are fighting a do or die battle against everyone from internet companies to cable companies. You can’t use old metrics for this. it makes no sense.