Verizon Reportedly Interested In Buying Comcast Or Other Big Cable Company

AT&T has been on a buying spree in the last two years, first snatching up DirecTV and its more than 20 million customers, and now trying to acquire the massive Time Warner media empire. The company’s nemeses at Verizon apparently have acquisition envy, and are mulling over a purchase of a cable biggie like Comcast or Charter.

This is according to the NY Post, which notes that Verizon has had no actual discussions with possible merger partners, but has apparently been putting the word out that it wants to buy a cable company.

Sources told the Post that, during the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam remarked to friends that his company is looking at cable not just as a revenue generator but for how a cable company’s network could be integrated into Verizon’s upcoming plans to deploy high-speed 5G wireless.

McAdams apparently didn’t name a potential merger target, but the Post’s sources contend that Comcast or Charter make the most sense. They each have significant coverage footprints in various parts of the country. A Comcast acquisition would also give Verizon a media conglomerate — in the form of NBCUniversal — to match what AT&T is hoping to acquire with its purchase of Time Warner.

Verizon’s most recent big-ticket acquisitions have mostly served as punchlines to jokes about dial-up and data breaches. First, the company spent $4.4 billion to buy AOL, apparently not knowing it could own AOL for free by just creating a new account every 30 days. Now it’s in the process of acquiring Yahoo for $4.8 billion — more than twice what anyone was expected to pay, and about $4.79999 billion more than anyone would pay after two separate data breaches were revealed, affecting 500 million and more than 1 billion Yahoo accounts, respectively.

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