AT&T workforce stricken with over 2000 layoffs U.S-wide days after $1000 tax reform bonus ...

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 82
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    lkrupp said:
    What’s so tough to understand here? The traditional landline business has been declining for the last ten years. Fewer people with traditional wireline service means fewer workers needed to maintain the traditional copper wire based network. I retired from AT&T five years ago. The wireline switch I maintained in the Central Office had 25,000 subscribers at its peak. . Today it has less than 5,000 subscribers left. AT&T has told its unions it plans to decommission its landline switches by 2020. The office I worked in had ten technicians in it in 1985. Today it has one left to take care of things. I have three adult children and NONE of them have a landline in their homes. AT&T has thousands of employees it doesn’t need anymore. Wireless cellphone service and satellite tv don’t need many people to maintain it. Technology has left traditional telecommunications workers without jobs. What’s AT&T supposed to do? Keep all those people on their payroll while they sit in the garages playing cards because there’s nothing to do outside?

    In the socialist dreamworld people keep their jobs forever while their pay keeps going up. In the real world technology wipes out jobs on a regular basis. All those McDonald’s workers striking to get $15/hr? They will be replaced by AI in the restaurants. An AI terminal can learn to ask if you want cheese with your burger better than a human worker ever could. Alexa or Siri could probably do it right now.
    That’s spoken like a man who managed to be born at the right time. I wonder if you would be so insouciant about these job losses were this to have happened to you about 20 years ago. 

    I personally doubt robots (not AI) will take over in MacDonald’s. Maybe it will though but remember that capitalism can’t replace all its workers permanently or even large numbers of them because the system needs workers as consumers. A system with 50% of people out of work permanently will collapse, for obvious reasons. 

    As for claiming people keeping jobs and getting increased wages is a socialist fantasy I would argue that it’s a capitalist fantasy. It did used to happen in capitalism - one with a strong organised labour movement and a bipartisan agreement on important government roles,  but it isn’t inevitable. If you don’t want real socialism, or protectionism or possibly fascism, then capitalism should be able to pay $15 minimum wage and employ everybody. And then $20. Wages used to grow like that. 

    Trump and Ryan have probably killed their own ideology here. You can’t actually argue with anybody’s pay check as much as you’d like to. Wages won’t grow. We are already seeing discussions about Apple bringing the money back to ... buy more stock and return more dividends. No doubt this will benefit some investors but there’s no talk of new jobs or increasing wages. Or hiring the unskilled and making them skilled or semi skilled, as factories used to do but don’t anymore.

     In fact Tim Cook has said that factory jobs are never coming back not because of wages, but because the US doesn’t have the skills. In particular tooling. It would be socialist I suppose to tax Apple to pay for university or technical schools to teach that, so the jobs will stay abroad. 
    edited December 2017 tzm41
  • Reply 42 of 82
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    Dude ,you don’t know how the economy works.Just like most democrats.
    Please stop trying to be over smart.
    Oh!  You're serious?   You mean Trickle Down actually works?   Really?
    ... Here I thought was all a Republican scam that the right-wing cultists bought for the THIRD TIME!
    ..........I guess they're just slow learners...
    singularity
  • Reply 43 of 82
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    These layoffs had nothing to do with tax reform.  My 401K has double digit growth in 2017, The economy has grown as well, with retail  sales were up 4.5%. Unemployment is at its lowest in 17 years at 4.1% in November.  Keep listening to the bias liberal jealous tear shedding Clinton losers instead of researching and posting facts. 
  • Reply 44 of 82
    wunthyllwunthyll Posts: 1unconfirmed, member
    There is no news here for anyone who follows AT&T. The wireless company is non-union and the legacy Baby Bells are mostly CWA Union members. What is today called AT&T is the old Southwestern Bell Telephone operating company that bought up Ameritech, PacTel, Bell South and the old long distance unit of the original AT&T. The wireless operations used to be Cingular Wireless and is a non union company. The old Union companies have been a shrinking ice cube for years and the largely non-union parts have been where the growth exist.

    AT&T’s CEO worked his way up from the bottom and has implemented a very generous educational program for employees to train up and get the skills necessary to get the jobs that are growing as the legacy ones die off. Many of the CWA members have been fighting this transition for years and oppose the system- not wanting to take non-union positions elsewhere in the company. The copper wire company is dying and the CWA is acting like it is 1979.

    AT&T has been selling off small town phone systems and keeping the ones in more densely populated areas. AT&T Fiber is building out in the old copper wire company’s rights of way. If we could see a show of hands you will find out few people have a land line phone from AT&T, so not many people are required to maintain it. On the DIRECTV side, most new installations are done by contractors and many customers will eventually move over to DIRECTVNOW which is online self service and web based. With no end user equipment.

    The CWA members fighting this are like buggy whip makers at the dawn of the car age- their trade is falling out of favor and they need to adapt. AT&T is not the bad guy here, these people go through annual reviews where options are discussed, long term job prospects reviewed and choices are made. AT&T has made a great effort to allow employees to adapt to the changing business, and many want to stay in their CWA Union positions rather than change with the company.

    Despite the angle being promoted here, this has nothing to do with Trump or the GOP Tax Bill. This about a big legacy company integrating acquisitions and adapting to changes in the business. They have no place for those not willing to change with the company.
    AT&T really is the bad guy with this one. We’ve been fighting to get the new work. We want the DTV work and they won’t give it to us. We want the 5G home antenna work and they won’t give it to us. We want the fiber work and they won’t give it to us. Not to mention the current roadmap has us combining the satellite, FTTN, FTTP, and cellular efforts into one platform. We’ve been begging them to let us do the work that they’ve been creating, but they won’t give it to us. And this article undercuts the numbers considerably. We had over 200 cuts in Michigan alone, not only that, but in many places they broke contract and fired based on attendance and performance, rather than going straight seniority.  This was a move to weaken the union so they can stop paying decent wages and benefits. The bonus was to curry favor with 45’s administration to buy Time Warner, and the claims of job creation and investment are bullshit. Source: I’m one of the effected employees. 
  • Reply 45 of 82
    mac_128mac_128 Posts: 3,454member
    xiphone said:
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    These layoffs had nothing to do with tax reform.  My 401K has double digit growth in 2017, The economy has grown as well, with retail  sales were up 4.5%. Unemployment is at its lowest in 17 years at 4.1% in November.  Keep listening to the bias liberal jealous tear shedding Clinton losers instead of researching and posting facts. 
    Yup. All before Trump passed a single piece of legislation ...
    tzm41GeorgeBMac
  • Reply 46 of 82
    eightzero said:
    karmadave said:
    Corporations are not benevolent organizations dedicated to the welfare of their employees. They are profit-seeking enterprises that will take whatever steps necessary (usually within the law) to maximize revenues, profits, and shareholder value. Yeah. The timing of this sucks, especially for those affected, but the reality is that AT&T is managing in it's own self-interest. Tax cuts have very little influence since most large corporations already employ various techniques to minimize taxes. Apple being one of the most creative tax avoiders...

    What evidence do you have that Apple does not pay all the tax it owes? I agree there are pending legal disputes, but do you expect Apple to refuse to pay once a legal determination is made? And I'm curious: are you a "tax avoider" by paying only what you legally owe? Or do you put a few extra dollars in to try to help out?


    His evidence is Ireland!
  • Reply 47 of 82
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    smaffei said:
    eightzero said:
    karmadave said:
    Corporations are not benevolent organizations dedicated to the welfare of their employees. They are profit-seeking enterprises that will take whatever steps necessary (usually within the law) to maximize revenues, profits, and shareholder value. Yeah. The timing of this sucks, especially for those affected, but the reality is that AT&T is managing in it's own self-interest. Tax cuts have very little influence since most large corporations already employ various techniques to minimize taxes. Apple being one of the most creative tax avoiders...

    What evidence do you have that Apple does not pay all the tax it owes? I agree there are pending legal disputes, but do you expect Apple to refuse to pay once a legal determination is made? And I'm curious: are you a "tax avoider" by paying only what you legally owe? Or do you put a few extra dollars in to try to help out?


    His evidence is Ireland!
    And that ‘evidence’ would be immaterial. Apple paid all the taxes it was required to pay under its agreement with Ireland. That’s not tax avoidance, that’s compliance. Then the EU steps in and says hey, wait a minute, we think Ireland made a mistake in its tax law. Yeah, that’s right, a mistake and now we want more money.
  • Reply 48 of 82
    carnegiecarnegie Posts: 1,077member
    asdasd said:
    eightzero said:
    karmadave said:
    Corporations are not benevolent organizations dedicated to the welfare of their employees. They are profit-seeking enterprises that will take whatever steps necessary (usually within the law) to maximize revenues, profits, and shareholder value. Yeah. The timing of this sucks, especially for those affected, but the reality is that AT&T is managing in it's own self-interest. Tax cuts have very little influence since most large corporations already employ various techniques to minimize taxes. Apple being one of the most creative tax avoiders...

    What evidence do you have that Apple does not pay all the tax it owes? I agree there are pending legal disputes, but do you expect Apple to refuse to pay once a legal determination is made? And I'm curious: are you a "tax avoider" by paying only what you legally owe? Or do you put a few extra dollars in to try to help out?


    Avoidance is legal. Evasion is not. Therefore Apple can avoid taxes and still pay all the taxes it owes. It could also not avoid taxes and pay more, and also pay all the taxes it owes. 

    Avoidance isn’t claiming expenses etc. It’s generally using a loophole in the law to not pay taxes that the taxation authorities have imposed using schemes they didn’t anticipate. Or using offshore tax havens to avoid tax.  
    That's a narrow conception of the term tax avoidance. (See, e.g., here or here or here.) But often people use the same term to refer to things which differ substantially.

    That said, what do you think Apple does that would fit within the conception that you're using? I'm not suggesting they don't do anything that would, just curious what it is you think would. I find that a lot of what people think is the case with regard to Apple's taxes, isn't.

    Perhaps the most impactful thing which I can think of which some might think of as representing Apple using a tax loophole (i.e., as you've referred to it, something that wasn't anticipated by the taxing authorities), would be Apple's avoidance of a lot of taxation on the profits of its Irish subsidiaries. But that wasn't possible due to a loophole, it was possible due to an oddity of Irish tax law - an intentional oddity. Ireland chose to make the profits of non-Irish branches of Irish corporations, under some circumstances, not (income) taxable in Ireland. That policy represented an oddity in the world of international tax law. But it was intentional. It was a way in which Ireland competed for economic activity. It was meant to help Ireland attract business activity from foreign corporations. The tax receipts that wouldn't be collected under such a policy were, for the most part, receipts Ireland wouldn't have gotten anyway. But with such a policy (combined with other international aspects of Irish tax policy), Ireland could benefit in other ways - e.g. by the creation and maintenance of jobs and through other tax revenue that would result.

    When it comes to Apple not paying (U.S. income) taxes on certain foreign profits, that too doesn't represent the use of a tax loophole. That is how U.S. tax law is designed. Most advanced economies no longer tax those kinds of profits (domestically) to begin with. The U.S. still did up until now, but it also - intentionally - made it so that the tax on such foreign profits (other than certain kinds of profits) was deferred until those profits were distributed to the U.S. taxpayer (e.g. the parent domestic corporation). How many Americans pay personal income taxes on the undistributed earnings of the corporations which they own (or own part of)? Generally speaking, we don't. That's by design. We pay taxes on capital gains we might make from selling stock and we pay taxes on dividends that are distributed to us. But we don't have to pay income taxes on the retained profits of the corporations we own. Pass-though entities (e.g. partnerships or LLCs) are a different matter. They don't have to pay the extra layer of income taxes which corporations do, but generally speaking their owners are responsible for the income taxes on their profits when those profits are made - not when they are distributed.

    And when it comes to Apple, the foreign holdings (on which U.S. income taxes haven't yet been paid) we're talking about don't represent profits which were shifted offshore by way of accounting gimmicks. We're talking about profits which are legitimately made outside the United States. Apple doesn't avoid U.S. income taxation on profits legitimately made in the United States. Indeed, I think most people would be pretty surprised if they realized how much U.S. income tax Apple pays relative to, e.g., how much revenue (and profit) it generates from U.S. sales. (Though, to be clear, that isn't really what matters when it comes to how international income tax policies generally allocate profits and determine where taxes are owed.)
  • Reply 49 of 82
    Why Americans allow CEO's to fire workers willy-nilly to make their short-term bottom line look better is beyond me.

    Yep, lay them off and put them on the dole. Great.

    In Germany, for example, BMW is not allowed to layoff and send them to the unemployment line for the government to pay. First, they have to go on 3/4 time, then half time, then 1/4 time and into a retraining program. Now that's how a responsible company should operate. 

    Case in point, Germany was the last country to go into the Great Recession of 2008 and the first to come out! 

    Oh well. 



    And Germany has world class trade schools and graduates are highly valued by corporations and by society in general
    dewmeGeorgeBMac
  • Reply 50 of 82
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    Landlines being considered legacy is a big part of the problem here. Instead of upgrading copper to fiber optic and retraining those workers, they're just ditching it all and presuming they can shift everything to wireless. There's not enough bandwidth for everyone and everything to be on wireless cellular networks. Certainly not without ridiculous slowness and data caps. But it's cheaper tech and easier for the telecoms to make quarterly profits without investing much in infrastructure. It's the stupidity of greed and a refusal to accept the facts of physics (and plans to make even more money by charging certain people extra for data-overage and throttling people they can't get more money from, to deal with the reality of bandwidth restrictions).

    Some day we will, as a civilization, be hating on telecoms for the disassembly of our land line infrastructure for the selfish and myopic focus on the unsustainable pipe dream of wireless everything.
  • Reply 51 of 82
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    Yes, because otherwise AT&T would not have gotten rid of them?
    Are you telling me that AT&T fires people against the company's goals of making more money? That does not make any business sense! Or...or, just a thought, they were planning on downsizing anyway and repubs or dems have nothing to do with that?

    edited December 2017
  • Reply 52 of 82
    Why Americans allow CEO's to fire workers willy-nilly to make their short-term bottom line look better is beyond me.

    Yep, lay them off and put them on the dole. Great.

    In Germany, for example, BMW is not allowed to layoff and send them to the unemployment line for the government to pay. First, they have to go on 3/4 time, then half time, then 1/4 time and into a retraining program. Now that's how a responsible company should operate. 

    Case in point, Germany was the last country to go into the Great Recession of 2008 and the first to come out! 

    Oh well. 



    And Germany has world class trade schools and graduates are highly valued by corporations and by society in general
    And yet, not one Apple, nor Amazon, nor Google, nor Facebook, or Netflix, nor Uber, nor Tesla, nor...

    Go figure. 
  • Reply 53 of 82
    roake said:
    Why Americans allow CEO's to fire workers willy-nilly to make their short-term bottom line look better is beyond me.

    Yep, lay them off and put them on the dole. Great.

    In Germany, for example, BMW is not allowed to layoff and send them to the unemployment line for the government to pay. First, they have to go on 3/4 time, then half time, then 1/4 time and into a retraining program. Now that's how a responsible company should operate. 

    Case in point, Germany was the last country to go into the Great Recession of 2008 and the first to come out! 

    Oh well. 



    Three things:

    1. Great Resession?
    2. AT&T sucks
    3. I am apparently a “tax avoider” as I only pay what I owe.  I use an reputable accountant to be certain.
    Yes..but did you pay your (cough) FAIR SHARE? /s
  • Reply 54 of 82
    rcpone said:
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    Spoken like a true liberal. Always someone else to blame. 

    " layoff notices to a large number of landline, legacy service, and home installers spanning the country "
    Anybody in these kinds of positions has had a very long time to prepare and should have seen the writing on the wall. No one to blame but themselves if they're not prepared to step into another role by now.
    Blaming everyone was never a virtue for an actual liberal...hence, the name.
    But today's left is just as liberal, as Hitler was jew loving... Seriously, why does it have to be explained?
  • Reply 55 of 82
    asdasd said:
    lkrupp said:
    What’s so tough to understand here? The traditional landline business has been declining for the last ten years. Fewer people with traditional wireline service means fewer workers needed to maintain the traditional copper wire based network. I retired from AT&T five years ago. The wireline switch I maintained in the Central Office had 25,000 subscribers at its peak. . Today it has less than 5,000 subscribers left. AT&T has told its unions it plans to decommission its landline switches by 2020. The office I worked in had ten technicians in it in 1985. Today it has one left to take care of things. I have three adult children and NONE of them have a landline in their homes. AT&T has thousands of employees it doesn’t need anymore. Wireless cellphone service and satellite tv don’t need many people to maintain it. Technology has left traditional telecommunications workers without jobs. What’s AT&T supposed to do? Keep all those people on their payroll while they sit in the garages playing cards because there’s nothing to do outside?

    In the socialist dreamworld people keep their jobs forever while their pay keeps going up. In the real world technology wipes out jobs on a regular basis. All those McDonald’s workers striking to get $15/hr? They will be replaced by AI in the restaurants. An AI terminal can learn to ask if you want cheese with your burger better than a human worker ever could. Alexa or Siri could probably do it right now.
    That’s spoken like a man who managed to be born at the right time. I wonder if you would be so insouciant about these job losses were this to have happened to you about 20 years ago. 

    I personally doubt robots (not AI) will take over in MacDonald’s. Maybe it will though but remember that capitalism can’t replace all its workers permanently or even large numbers of them because the system needs workers as consumers. A system with 50% of people out of work permanently will collapse, for obvious reasons. 

    As for claiming people keeping jobs and getting increased wages is a socialist fantasy I would argue that it’s a capitalist fantasy. It did used to happen in capitalism - one with a strong organised labour movement and a bipartisan agreement on important government roles,  but it isn’t inevitable. If you don’t want real socialism, or protectionism or possibly fascism, then capitalism should be able to pay $15 minimum wage and employ everybody. And then $20. Wages used to grow like that. 

    Trump and Ryan have probably killed their own ideology here. You can’t actually argue with anybody’s pay check as much as you’d like to. Wages won’t grow. We are already seeing discussions about Apple bringing the money back to ... buy more stock and return more dividends. No doubt this will benefit some investors but there’s no talk of new jobs or increasing wages. Or hiring the unskilled and making them skilled or semi skilled, as factories used to do but don’t anymore.

     In fact Tim Cook has said that factory jobs are never coming back not because of wages, but because the US doesn’t have the skills. In particular tooling. It would be socialist I suppose to tax Apple to pay for university or technical schools to teach that, so the jobs will stay abroad. 
    People said the same thing about agriculture 100 years ago, mining 50 years ago, and manufacturing 25 years ago. 

    We’ll survive. 
    lkrupp
  • Reply 56 of 82
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,335member
    Technology disruption of traditional jobs is not political. Trying to stave it off is. By the way, GE power systems is cutting 12,000 jobs and Siemens is cutting 6,900 jobs in similar areas, which makes AT&T losses look less bad. Layoffs like these in a time of relative economic boom, virtually no unemployment, and in companies with >100 year successful track records is telling. From an AppleInsider perspective the real question is: "How does Apple avoid becoming the next statistic along these same lines?" 

    This article could be dated 2017 and with a few name changes be fully descriptive of the current situation. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/09/22/Automate-emigrate-or-evaporate/7971433051200/

    That's nearly 35 years ago.
  • Reply 57 of 82
    rcpone said:
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    Spoken like a true liberal. Always someone else to blame. 

    " layoff notices to a large number of landline, legacy service, and home installers spanning the country "
    Anybody in these kinds of positions has had a very long time to prepare and should have seen the writing on the wall. No one to blame but themselves if they're not prepared to step into another role by now.
    Blaming everyone was never a virtue for an actual liberal...hence, the name.
    But today's left is just as liberal, as Hitler was jew loving... Seriously, why does it have to be explained?
    Get back on your meds, man.
  • Reply 58 of 82
    rcpone said:
    The Middle Class and these AT&T Employees can thank the Republicans and Trump for their loss of jobs while the rich get richer.
    Spoken like a true liberal. Always someone else to blame. 

    " layoff notices to a large number of landline, legacy service, and home installers spanning the country "
    Anybody in these kinds of positions has had a very long time to prepare and should have seen the writing on the wall. No one to blame but themselves if they're not prepared to step into another role by now.
    Blaming everyone was never a virtue for an actual liberal...hence, the name.
    But today's left is just as liberal, as Hitler was jew loving... Seriously, why does it have to be explained?
    Get back on your meds, man.
    You couldn’t have written a more incoherent response... I simply stated that what is called liberalism (dictionary definition) is not what a democratic party of today has to offer. In the “response” to that, you suggested that I needed to get back to my meds...
    What would you think of a person, if he has told you that you need medication, after you had said that 2+2=4?
    edited December 2017 tallest skilGeorgeBMacMacsplosion
  • Reply 59 of 82
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    asdasd said:
    lkrupp said:
    What’s so tough to understand here? The traditional landline business has been declining for the last ten years. Fewer people with traditional wireline service means fewer workers needed to maintain the traditional copper wire based network. I retired from AT&T five years ago. The wireline switch I maintained in the Central Office had 25,000 subscribers at its peak. . Today it has less than 5,000 subscribers left. AT&T has told its unions it plans to decommission its landline switches by 2020. The office I worked in had ten technicians in it in 1985. Today it has one left to take care of things. I have three adult children and NONE of them have a landline in their homes. AT&T has thousands of employees it doesn’t need anymore. Wireless cellphone service and satellite tv don’t need many people to maintain it. Technology has left traditional telecommunications workers without jobs. What’s AT&T supposed to do? Keep all those people on their payroll while they sit in the garages playing cards because there’s nothing to do outside?

    In the socialist dreamworld people keep their jobs forever while their pay keeps going up. In the real world technology wipes out jobs on a regular basis. All those McDonald’s workers striking to get $15/hr? They will be replaced by AI in the restaurants. An AI terminal can learn to ask if you want cheese with your burger better than a human worker ever could. Alexa or Siri could probably do it right now.
    That’s spoken like a man who managed to be born at the right time. I wonder if you would be so insouciant about these job losses were this to have happened to you about 20 years ago. 

    I personally doubt robots (not AI) will take over in MacDonald’s. Maybe it will though but remember that capitalism can’t replace all its workers permanently or even large numbers of them because the system needs workers as consumers. A system with 50% of people out of work permanently will collapse, for obvious reasons. 

    As for claiming people keeping jobs and getting increased wages is a socialist fantasy I would argue that it’s a capitalist fantasy. It did used to happen in capitalism - one with a strong organised labour movement and a bipartisan agreement on important government roles,  but it isn’t inevitable. If you don’t want real socialism, or protectionism or possibly fascism, then capitalism should be able to pay $15 minimum wage and employ everybody. And then $20. Wages used to grow like that. 

    Trump and Ryan have probably killed their own ideology here. You can’t actually argue with anybody’s pay check as much as you’d like to. Wages won’t grow. We are already seeing discussions about Apple bringing the money back to ... buy more stock and return more dividends. No doubt this will benefit some investors but there’s no talk of new jobs or increasing wages. Or hiring the unskilled and making them skilled or semi skilled, as factories used to do but don’t anymore.

     In fact Tim Cook has said that factory jobs are never coming back not because of wages, but because the US doesn’t have the skills. In particular tooling. It would be socialist I suppose to tax Apple to pay for university or technical schools to teach that, so the jobs will stay abroad. 
    AT&T has been announcing layoffs at the end of the year for a long time now. I retired in December 2012. One reasons I did so was because it saved the job of a younger colleague. AT&T has programs in place to encourage old farts like me to retire when things get hairy. SIPP (supplementary income protection plan) gave me a big chunk of money to get the hell out. VSIPP (voluntary supplemental income protection plan) puts those who agree to it on standby for retirement. In other words you voluntarily agree that you will retire when a layoff is announced. 
  • Reply 60 of 82
    dysamoria said:
    Landlines being considered legacy is a big part of the problem here. Instead of upgrading copper to fiber optic and retraining those workers, they're just ditching it all and presuming they can shift everything to wireless. There's not enough bandwidth for everyone and everything to be on wireless cellular networks. Certainly not without ridiculous slowness and data caps. But it's cheaper tech and easier for the telecoms to make quarterly profits without investing much in infrastructure. It's the stupidity of greed and a refusal to accept the facts of physics (and plans to make even more money by charging certain people extra for data-overage and throttling people they can't get more money from, to deal with the reality of bandwidth restrictions).

    Some day we will, as a civilization, be hating on telecoms for the disassembly of our land line infrastructure for the selfish and myopic focus on the unsustainable pipe dream of wireless everything.
    Sorry but this is flat out wrong. You sound like a right wing oped writer during the Bush administration who claimed that electric cars and solar power would never be feasible. (Do not draw out the sharp knives at me conservatives, I voted for Bush ... twice.) You presume that mobile communications will always be as inefficient as they are now ... they won't. 6 years ago, back when 1 GHz dual core mobile SOCs were considered practically space age technology, smart devices couldn't handle real decompression. Now with monsters like the hexacore A11 (and Android competitors that have as many as 12 cores) mobile devices are capable of data compression/decompression that only workstations were capable of not long ago. Compression isn't used in mobile that much because most mobile networks are still operated on standards and designs from like the 1990s. Smartphones were merely tacked on to the pre-existing mobile infrastructure designed around voice. Redesign the infrastructure and to a degree the mobile tech around data and you will see the difference. Another thing: there is plenty of bandwidth available. Much of it was set aside for legacy and other barely used applications. Some of it, we don't have hardware - transmitters and radios to handle the frequencies - yet but that is trivial. For those, we can just convert the legacy/low use applications to mobile, increase the frequency ranges of the transmitters and receivers and there will be A TON of spectrum available.
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