Wall Street Wants Comcast to Buy Verizon With the Trump administration pretty keen on this whole merger and acquisition thing, Wall Street has been having an absolute field day hyping up all manner of megadeals. In addition to Sprint and T-Mobile's seemingly inevitable tie up, rumors have bubbled forth for months that Verizon was interested in buying either Comcast or Charter. And while many laughed off the competition-killing idea, and Verizon similarly tried to deny any such interest in such a megamerger, reports subsequently emerged indicated that Charter rejected a $100 billion buy out offer from Verizon for being too low.

Since then the Wall Street merger hype has rumbled forth, in part because Wall Street stock jocks often cash in on the hype they themselves begin. The latest example of said hype is coming from an analyst at Citi, who is banging the drum beat not for a Verizon acquisition of Charter or Comcast, but of a Comcast acquisition of Verizon. The Wall Street firm argued in a research note to investors that the "stars are aligning" for such a deal, and that Comcast should acquire Verizon to help drive adoption of its wireless services, drive fiber deeper into neighborhoods, help Verizon nab some tax perks, and generally aid Verizon through "wireless consolidation." This being Wall Street, there's of course zero concern given to the devastating impact such a deal would have on already meager broadband competition, since Verizon and Comcast compete head to head in a significant number of major metro markets. »twitter.com/carlquintani ··· 48212738









News Jump Charter Relaunches Free 60-day Internet And Wi-Fi Offer; NCTA: FCC Should Stick With 25/3 Speed Threshold; + more news Comcast Shuts Off Internet for Subs Who Were Sold Service Illegally; AT&T, Verizon Team To Stop T-Mobile 5G; + more news California Defends Its Net Neutrality Law; AT&T's Traffic Up 20% Despite Data Traffic Actually Being Down; + more news Are The Comcast-Charter X1 Talks Dead In The Water?; AT&T May Offer Phone Plans With Ads For Discounts; + more news Europe's Top Court: Net Neutrality Rules Bar Zero Rating; ViacomCBS To Rebrand CBS All Access As Paramount+; + more news Verizon To Buy Reseller TracFone For $7B; 5G Not The Competitive Threat To Cable Many Thought It Would Be; + more news MS.Wants Records From AT&T On $300M Project; Google Fiber Outages In Austin, Houston, Other Texan Cities; + more news States With The Biggest Decreases In Speed; AT&T Hopes You'll Forget Its Fight Against Accurate Maps; + more news AT&T's CEO Has A Familiar $olution To US Broadband Woes; EarthLink Files Suit Against Charter; + more news 5G Doesn't Live Up To Hype, AT&T's 5G Slower Than Its 4G; Cord-Cutting Now In 37% of Broadband Households; + more news ---------------------- this week last week most discussed

Most recommended from 40 comments

microphone

Premium Member

join:2009-04-29

Parkville, MD 26 recommendations microphone Premium Member That would reduce high speed competition in my area Both Comcast and Verizon FIOS provides service to my area. Having at least two high speed providers helps keep rates in check to some degree even if they are not as low as we would like them to be. What other choices are there? DSL is diminishing and Satellite is capped and expensive. I see no benefit to the consumer in such a merger. This is exactly the "marriage" that I would not celebrate.



If this proceeds an absolute condition should be that "Verizocast" has to sell access to their lines to other ISPs at reasonable rates; another condition would be that Comcast has to get rid of NBC.

Packeteers

Premium Member

join:2005-06-18

Forest Hills, NY ·Verizon FiOS

·Charter

Asus RT-AC3100

(Software) Asuswrt-Merlin

16 recommendations Packeteers Premium Member please god NO verizon is FINALLY investing again in it's own network;

IPTV, NG-PON2, 5G



verizon is FINALLY being more competitive again;

unlimited cellular (t-mobile), reduced price fios (altice)



verizon is finally a telco/cabletv company i hate the least,

please fcc & ftc don't let comcast f**k up anything else.



best advice; verizon should fire it's entire M&A staff,

and get back to focusing on good engineering work.

ham3843

join:2015-01-15

USA 8 recommendations ham3843 Member Wall Street is made up of vultures.

They're killing the geese that lay the Golden Eggs for a quick buck. Wall Street is providing windfalls in the short term, but destruction of organizations in the long run.They're killing the geese that lay the Golden Eggs for a quick buck.

maartena

Elmo

Premium Member

join:2002-05-10

Orange, CA 8 recommendations maartena Premium Member When Cable Companies and Telco Companies merge.... ...it will be disastrous for competition. There are many Comcast/Verizon markets out there. Unfortunately, we don't have a sensible FCC and/or government right now who will work to prevent such mergers, we have one that works for the corporations, not the people. So corporations seeking to buy competition and/or merge with competition to eliminate other competition may just happen. wkm001

join:2009-12-14 8 recommendations wkm001 Member They merge to form... If these two companies merged the offspring would have the price stubbornness of Verizon and the customer service of Comcast.



I had a Comcast sales person come to my house yesterday. Even though we have TV and internet with them he insisted we did not have an account. He finally backed down when I offered to get my bill. I talked to him for a while, at one point mentioning how bad customer service is. He wholeheartedly agreed with me.

tc1uscg

join:2005-03-09

Guantanamo 5 recommendations tc1uscg Member Drug Testing Guess drug testing is a thing of the past on Wall Street. navyson

join:2011-07-15

Upper Marlboro, MD 4 recommendations navyson Member Hello No Comcast would ruin Verizon.

battleop

join:2005-09-28

00000 3 recommendations battleop Member I don't see this happening. They over lap in too many areas. The amount property they would have to divest would be massive which would then make the deal unattractive for either side.



The only thing that I could see making it through is if the wireless side of the company was completely separated from everything else and then Comcast just bought the wireless.

josephf

join:2009-04-26 3 recommendations josephf Member Comcast-Charter Merger Better a Comcast-Charter merger, which does not reduce competition, than a Verizon merger with either of them.

Anon33750

@ri.net 3 recommendations Anon33750 Anon Comcast&Charter+Verizon=Nationwide bundles plus less debt per cableco Why are these analysts ignoring the no compete "alliance" that is still ongoing? Each speculation wall street makes is done with a flitting attention span, ignoring the recent related events. Every time sprint announces a meeting with new prospective merger/investment partners, Wall Street forgets that the last talks yielded no results and may simply be a way to stall and grovel for financial support until they can trick a buyer into removing the burden from softbank's hands. That is if they do... but why do speculations never take recent events into account?