Back when the FCC, under chairman Ajit Pai, was lying about cyber attacks in order to ignore the overwhelmingly negative reaction to its plans to repeal net neutrality protections, Pai promised that the repeal of all consumer protections would lead to big-time telecom investment in networks. The former Verizon lawyer and obvious telecom shill Pai didn’t even seem to convince most Republicans, as the overwhelming numbers showed Americans did not want net neutrality rules repealed. Now research firm MoffettNathanson LLC has analyzed the big telecom landscape of the past year and the level of investment by big telecom companies, and guess what: Deregulating the market, allowing big mergers, and offering up huge tax breaks haven’t led to more investment in broadband networks—in fact, it all seems to have led to less.
Telco-related wireline capex, meanwhile, is slated to fall from $20.3 billion in 2018 to $19.6 billion this year. That slight drop comes as AT&T completes the fiber buildout commitments originally promised when it acquired DirecTV by July, and as Verizon redirects capital to wireless, Moffett said
[…]
With those video-related declines as the backdrop, MoffettNathanson sees aggregate cable industry CPE spend as a percent of revenue dropping to 5.1% in 2019 from 5.9% in 2018, and plummeting to 2.6% by the end of 2022.
Very shortly after big companies like Verizon began to reap billions from Republican tax break giveaways, it was announced that none of that tax break money would be going into the infrastructure of anything besides big telecom CEOs’ pants pockets. By the end of 2018, the slowdown in big telecoms’ investment was becoming apparent. The only field being spent on is the wireless 5G miracle solution most telecoms have been promoting over the last year. This, of course, is still a ways away, and actually needs considerably more investment than these companies are promising.
"We believe significantly higher spending -- which would certainly be required for a meaningful millimeter wave 5G build -- will await either a more credible business case (still some years away, in our view) or more economically viable mid-band spectrum bands," Moffett explained. "These would be less capital-intensive, but they, too, are likely some years away."
Ajit Pai is arguably the most transparently corrupt official not working directly inside of the White House. As he does nothing to push these companies to at least pretend they are doing what they claimed, he is gifting them about $2 billion of local municipal money for the wireless network they were already investing in.