Your statement sounds correct but I don’t exactly like the reality.
Running a nationwide cellular network is expensive and complicated AF. You have to provide a level playing field if you want to enable competition without needing hundreds of millions of dollars to start up.
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/att-and-t-mobile-wha...
Also, T-mobile was hurting because it was the last major carrier that didn’t have the iPhone.
No Amount of mergers between giant monopolies is gong to fix structural problems.
On a cynical level, it maybe that "China" is used as an excuse to push through a merger for profits, but lets assume some innocence.
The execs. realize how costly 5G is going to be, and the only way they know to borrow that amount of money is increasing their underlying capital assets.
The problem is that Huawei became successful in 5G through massive government investment, currency arbitrage ( supported by the US ), cheaper land, cheaper engineer, ...
Just a side note, have a look at how Huawei operates. They build a giant 60,000 engineer city for their employees !
Is the US ready to create a giant 60,000 engineer city to compete in 5g ? where engineers are paid a fat salary with low rent ? ( in PPP terms )
5G maybe the reason why the US has to finally confront the structural reasons why they have become so uncompetitive in electronic hardware in relation to East Asia.
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-...
Why would anybody need to build a city of 60,000 engineers to compete in 5G? Europe's leading 5G makers are not doing that so that they can compete with Huawei, because it's obviously entirely unnecessary.
The US doesn't need to change anything to compete with China. It has been successfully out-competing China in nearly every field for decades, save for low value manufacturing. China poses no greater competitive threat in the middle and upper tiers of economic competition than Western Europe does (presently far less in fact). The US also didn't need to entirely alter itself to compete with Western Europe.
> the US has to finally confront the structural reasons why they have become so uncompetitive in electronic hardware in relation to East Asia
No it doesn't need to do that at all. The US leads the world by a large margin when it comes to the semiconductor industry - the most important components of electronics today. Manufacturing electronic hardware is a low value economic segment, which is why it's outsourced. It can be pushed from China to a dozen other countries instead (see Foxconn's statement that they're prepared to move Apple's manufacturing out of China any time, that's how weak China's value proposition really is). Samsung - the world's leading phone maker - has already done that, moving a lot of their phone manufacturing to Vietnam.
If they don’t, Sprint tanks, and we still have three main market leaders, however two will remain significantly ahead of the third. Keeping in mind that the two that are ahead are now playing the monopoly game and buying into other industries (see AT&T and Time Warner or AT&T and DirecTV or Verizon and Yahoo, etc)
This will probably help net neutrality slightly since T-Mobile and Sprint gotta duke it out offering more network throughout to customers while AT&T and VZW compete over speed... the four sort of forcing each other to sort of almost make something which appears neutral (it’s not).
Unless there are no gigantic telecoms or there’s way more government intervention in these markets (common carrier status anyone?) there will be no point in things like this against the bottom tier national providers.
