[creato]

> Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of the telecoms are in the low to mid teens or worse. That's pretty close to the S&P 500 average margin.

I would want to see the margins for just operating high speed internet service. I suspect their overall margins are lower because their financial picture is clouded by things like cable TV and content costs. A big reason why telecoms suck is precisely because if you just want high speed internet, they force you to buy all their bullshit content as well (for me, it's cheaper to buy internet + cable TV than just internet!), and they make it hard to buy that content any other way. The main action I'd like to see taken against telecoms is to force them to spin off their content businesses (and they never should have been allowed to buy them in the first place).

[rayiner]

The opposite is true. Video service enables companies to charge enough to justify broadband deployment. That’s why Google and Verizon offer video over their fiber service even though they don’t really have their own content. Verizon won’t expand FiOS into Baltimore because it can’t get a television franchise from the city without agreeing to onerous build-out requirements. Without video revenues FiOS isn’t really viable.

[creato]

Google Fiber charged $70/mo for internet, and $130/mo for cable TV [1]. Standalone TV streaming services are also around $50/mo (e.g. hulu [2], youtube live TV packages [3]).

Something doesn't add up. If it costs $50/mo to get cable TV content, why does it cost me $-10/mo with comcast?

1. https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2016/04/11/googl...

2. https://www.hulu.com/live-tv

3. https://tv.youtube.com

[_bxg1]

That may have been true at one point, but cable is on its last leg now. And streaming services (for now) go over all networks.

[treis]

>I would want to see the margins for just operating high speed internet service

You can't really break it out that way. The TV service and internet service use the same physical wire. That's a fixed cost per household and once you have it, it's only marginally more expensive to send TV with the internet. Double so since people without cable packages tend to replace them with streaming services.

[creato]

> That's a fixed cost per household and once you have it, it's only marginally more expensive to send TV with the internet.

That values the content at near zero, which I think is not correct, and part of the game telecoms are playing with their (local) monopoly pricing power.