Despite a strong economy, Verizon Communications will shed 10,400 employees and cut $10 billion in costs as part of a transformation initiative promoted by the company’s newest top executive.

“These changes are well-planned and anticipated, and they will be seamless to our customers,” said Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg. “This is a moment in time, given our financial and operational strength, to begin to better serve customers with more agility, speed and flexibility.”

For Andrew Challenger, vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm that closely monitors corporate layoffs, Verizon’s willingness to let go of 7% of their workforce is an ominous sign of possible additional job reductions in the future.

Vestberg has advocated reorienting Verizon towards a potentially lucrative 5G wireless future. The estimated $10 billion in cost savings could placate investors on Wall Street alarmed about increased spending Verizon is likely to undertake to deploy 5G infrastructure over the next five years.

In October, Verizon offered more than 44,000 employees a voluntary buyout package and announced it would transfer thousands of current employees to Infosys, an outsourcing company headquartered in India. The voluntary separation package included up to 60 weeks’ salary, bonus and benefits, depending on length of service. This morning, accepted participants received word of their last day of employment, which will be the last day of this year or at the end of March or June, 2019. Verizon currently has 152,300 employees.

Challenger believes Verizon is likely to continue letting employees go as the company faces ongoing pressures on its landline and business service units and endures cord-cutting for its FiOS fiber to the home service. Challenger told CNBC the 44,000 workers who took Verizon’s offer likely made a smart decision. Companies that offer voluntary buyouts in good times can be a sign of likely layoffs when the economy slows down. With record low unemployment, the Verizon workers leaving the telecom company are likely to find new jobs much easier than those forced to look during a recession.

Verizon employees transferred to Infosys may be among the next to be targeted in future layoffs, according to Challenger. Verizon workers will be working closely with low-paid Indian staffers who may eventually replace them.

Workers who are assigned to train cheaper workers should keep their eyes open and resumes ready, Challenger warned.

Rutledge

Charter Communications is using the benefits of the Republican-promoted tax cut to buy back its own stock, because the only other option under consideration was using the money to buy up other cable operators.

“From a [mergers and acquisitions] perspective, I think cable is a great business. If there were assets for sale that we could do more of, we would do that,” said Charter Communications CEO Thomas Rutledge at this week’s UBS Global Media & Communications Conference. “We’ve been buying a lot of our own stock back. Why? Because we think the cable business is a great business and we haven’t been able to buy other cable assets.”

Charter is not using the company’s lower tax rate to benefit Spectrum customers with lower bills or more extravagant upgrades. Instead, it is accelerating efforts to please shareholders and executives with efforts to boost its share price — something key to top executives’ performance bonuses.

With digital and broadband upgrades nearly complete in areas formerly served by Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks — the cable companies Charter acquired in 2016 — Rutledge told investors he can initiate additional upgrades without spending huge sums on infrastructure buildouts.

Gigabit speed is now available in most markets, and the company has doubled its lowest internet download speeds in areas where it faces significant competition from AT&T from 100 to 200 Mbps, boosting sales of Spectrum broadband service, according to Rutledge.

Today, about 60% of Spectrum customers are offered 100 Mbps, while the other 40% — mostly in AT&T service areas — are getting 200 Mbps.

Rutledge told investors he does not see much threat from Verizon FiOS or its newly launched 5G offerings, and has no immediate plans to upgrade service in Verizon service areas because neither offering seems that compelling.

“I saw that Verizon had some passings that they could do 800 Mbps in,” Rutledge said. “We have 51 million passings that we can do 1 gigabit in and we can go to 10 gigabits relatively inexpensively and I think we will because I think the world will go to 10 gigabits.”

Analysts are uncertain whether Rutledge’s comments are naïve or brave.

“We see 5G fixed wireless broadband [like that offered by Verizon] as the largest existential threat to broadband providers, by far,” wrote analysts at Cowen. Until now, most broadband competition for cable operators came from phone companies pitching DSL. Verizon retrenched on its FiOS offering several years ago. But AT&T has been more aggressive upgrading urban areas to fiber service, which has forced Charter to respond with higher speeds and better promotions.

Rutledge does not see Verizon’s 5G being a significant competitive threat for several years, and suspects Wall Street may once again punish Verizon for spending money on a wireless network less capable than what the cable industry offers today. Shareholders may also dislike watching Verizon distracted by the home broadband market when portable wireless revenues are much more important to the company.

Verizon officials claim about half of those signing up for its 5G service plan were not current Verizon customers. But the company would not say whether their new fixed wireless customers were coming largely from cable or DSL disconnects, which would prove marketplace disruption.

An unhappy customer in Georgia.

Victor Brown, like many residential customers in rural northeastern Ohio, has one option for internet access — Windstream, an independent phone company that typically serves areas larger companies like AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink forgot. For 17 years, his internet speed has been absolutely consistent, and slow.

“It’s 1.2 Mbps day or night, no more and no less, and for that they are charging me $58 a month,” Brown told Stop the Cap! “In that time, there has never been an upgrade, a real commitment to improve service, or anything except repetitive sales calls and mailers offering to upgrade me to a faster speed level Windstream cannot actually deliver.”

Windsteam has told its investors that it expects to offer 60% of its customers at least 25 Mbps service by the end of 2018. In fact, Brown has already been offered that for nearly a year, but the service is not actually available.

“They will switch you to 25 Mbps today, with the higher bill to boot, but you won’t actually get any better speed than you have right now,” Brown said. “I know because we tried.”

Brown and several of his neighbors all attempted to upgrade to the higher-speed service advertised. Windstream accepted their orders, charged them more, and delivered exactly the same 1.2 Mbps service they have always had.

“It took a service technician coming out to make it clear to us there was no way we would ever get faster speed because there was too much copper wiring between their office and our homes,” Brown said. “The technician felt for us, and about half of his service calls were disappointing customers like us.”

Brown explained the Windstream technician candidly told him that the company’s head office is behind the speed upgrades, but does not actually have a clear understanding of the state of the local network. Marketing then sells customers on better service Windstream’s network is not capable of providing.

“They need to spend money to replace some copper with fiber but there is no money for that,” Brown said. “The most the technician could suggest was installing a bonded DSL connection that would use two different phone lines and deliver 2.4 Mbps. That would come at a price, however.”

Ruth in Cochranton, Penn., is in exactly the same position.

“We are paying for internet speed that we aren’t receiving,” Ruth complained. “It is so slow that we have a hard time getting a short 50 second video to load. Forget watching a YouTube video, it’s not going to happen.”

Over in Lilitz, Penn., Eileen and her neighbors were also dealing with temporary phone lines Windstream installed by dropping both on their lawns and then leaving them unburied for nine months. She cannot get anyone from the company to bury the lines despite seven separate phone calls. Down the street, internet and phone outages can last a week after a strong rainstorm hits the area, and since the weather has turned much colder, hum and crackle on the neighborhood’s phone lines have disrupted phone calls and DSL service. Nobody from Windstream has come to fix the problem.

Windstream tells a very different story to its investors in the form of ‘upgrades by press release’ and cheerful investor conference calls that claim dramatic improvements in service and growth. While cable operators are touting increasing availability of gigabit service, phone companies like Windstream are promising to give a little more than half their customers the minimum definition of broadband service — 25/3 Mbps, by the end of this year. Many of Windstream’s other half get nothing close to those speeds, with 1-3 Mbps common in rural areas.

Wall Street balks at the dollar amounts it would take for Windstream to fully update its network to offer broadband speeds that were common for cable subscribers a decade ago. That kind of network investment would likely drive down the share price, impact shareholder dividends or stock buyback plans, and increase debt. Instead, many phone companies are hoping the federal government will come to the rescue and subsidize rural network improvements through the FCC’s Connect America Fund or government grants. But many of those grants won’t deliver service improvements to existing customers. Instead it will allow rural phone companies to bring broadband to customers who never had it before.

Even the threat of new competition has not inspired many investor-owned phone companies to embark on a spending spree. That competition may eventually come from new wireless broadband services like 5G, but most observers predict that will be years away in the rural communities Windstream traditionally serves. Where Windstream does face competition, it often still loses market share, usually to the local cable company.

“My sister has Comcast and although they are evil as can be, at least their internet speed matches what they sell, and it is shockingly fast in comparison to what DSL has given me for nearly 20 years,” Brown said. “Unfortunately, no cable company is going to wire us up. There are only a few houses on my street.”

Brown believes it is time for the federal government to start insisting that investor-owned phone companies do better.

“We have universal service laws for landlines but not for internet? That does not make sense to me,” Brown tells us. “Isn’t it time for the government to insist that all providers deliver at least 25 Mbps service to their customers? They are not going to do it without someone ordering them to.”

Amazon wants to be a major player in live regional sports television, aggressively bidding for the 22 regional sports network that Disney acquired from 21st Century Fox, according to a report from CNBC.

The undisclosed bid covers all of the Fox Sports networks plus YES – the New York Yankees network.

If successful, the e-commerce company would win broadcasting and streaming rights for 44 pro teams from the NBA (basketball), NHL (hockey), and MLB (baseball).

Amazon’s competing bidders include Wall Street funds and broadcasters, including Apollo Global Management, KKR, The Blackstone Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tegna. The New York Yankees are also interested in taking a majority interest in YES, the cable network that features its games.

As part of a major asset sale, Fox sold many of its television and movie properties to Disney, but the federal government ordered Disney to divest its interest in Fox’s regional sports networks to win approval of the deal. There is a possibility Fox may attempt to buy back its sports networks. John Malone, a long time cable industry insider, predicts Fox is the most likely winner if they do bid, having sold the networks to Disney for $15 billion and potentially buying them back for as little as $8 billion.

Should Amazon win control of the regional sports networks, it will become an even larger player in live sports entertainment. Amazon Prime began streaming NFL games to subscribers on Thursday evenings in 2017, reportedly paying the NFL $65 million per year under the deal.

CNBC reports Amazon is bidding to take control of 22 Fox regional sports networks now owned by Disney. (4:44)

Wireless companies want cheap and fast access to public infrastructure to place tens of thousands of small cells capable of delivering next generation 5G services. But most Americans won’t benefit for years, the Wall Street Journal reports, and wireless companies are under pressure from Wall Street to raise your wireless bill to profit from the upgrades. (4:48)