In their defence, they did try just about everything.
Seeing the clear disadvantages of selling dumb pipes while the real value moved to higher layers in the network, telecom companies spent decades trying to climb that ladder.
They tried content, and that went about as well as you'd expect. They tried to become enterprise technology companies, only to discover that everyone from IBM to Accenture was, on average, not too bad at various bits of that business.
They built and operated data centres, only to discover the sheer scale of the hyperscalers made it hard to compete, and that selling out to colocation and infrastructure specialists – with hyperscalar customers – made more sense. Meanwhile, they sought greater scale themselves; in late June, Verizon and BT announced a 50-50 JV to combine their international operations.
But the old-school operators may have one more trick up their sleeves: a whole bunch of nondescript buildings full of networking equipment just begging for new purpose, right as demand for inference at the edge burgeons.
And it looks like they're going to be grabbing the opportunity.
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