$4 Billion Joke (MOT, SBC, SFA)

Head of IPTV for SBC believes "$4 billion is very little money" and if he "bets wrong, it's not much money for us to burn", writes "Slash", a professional investor with experience on both the buy-side and sell-side. I do not own any SBC shares but this sure do not seem like "in the best interest of shareholders" - the tag line managements use to circumvent any question they do not want to answer.

Given that all telcos have seen accelerating local line losses (the bread and butter for them) I would not want someone just "burning" $4 billion.

On the other hand, SBC also announced yesterday that it will be using SFA and MOT set-top boxes for IPTV. That's just great! whatever happend to opening up the GA monopoly that exists on the cable side? I thought the entire point of going IP was to give choices to consumers. I guess they are more worried about burning money than giving choices. I agree that there are not many companies that can efficiently scale production for large subscriber base of SBC in the begining. But it would be a welcome sign to see SBC opening up the network to these smaller companies later in the evolution of IPTV rollout- if it ever happens since we all know its just a $4 billon joke!

I wouldn't mind having $4b under management, if any one has some to burn. Probably give you a better return then some heat from burning it.

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