Fierce

When AT&T officially closed its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, it spun up advertising as one of four core pillars of its newly expanded business. Over the next few years, that business could grow into a beast tough enough to fight off the digital ad giants of the world. Though linear television is experiencing some secular decline, it’s still a massive advertising magnet. Before the merger, AT&T had access to a modest amount of ad inventory through its DirecTV platform.

Verizon and AT&T quickly rejected a proposal by Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to use San Jose’s (CA) approach to small cells as a template for similar deployments in other cities. Hovering over the issue is a continued push by the nation’s wireless network operators to get the FCC to issue guidelines for how cities and states should smooth the rollout of small cells—including how much local regulators can charge carriers for small cell deployments.

 The analysts at Oppenheimer raised their capital expenditure estimates for both AT&T and Verizon for 2018, noting that both carriers are spending slightly more on their network efforts than the analysts had initially expected. The analysts also lowered their capex estimate for Sprint for the current quarter to just $1 billion, down from $1.5 billion, but the firm didn’t change its estimates for Sprint’s total 2018 capex spending.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that the company’s work to upgrade its network with FirstNet’s 700 MHz spectrum will position it to move to 5G network technology via a software upgrade. “To build out this FirstNet capability, this first responder network, we have to go climb every cell tower. Literally, we have to go touch every cell tower over the next couple of years,” explained Stephenson. "As we're touching those cell towers, every single one of them, we have a lot of spectrum in inventory.