Comment by Nextgrid
8 hours ago
Almost; you need maintenance and monitoring but that doesn't take anywhere near 100k people - assuming they even use their own headcount for this instead of just outsourcing maintenance to their equipment vendor.
Big Tech companies operate much more complex systems (for starters, they actually build greenfield stuff instead of buying ready-made equipment from a vendor and plugging it in) and have way less headcount.
Carrier-level telco is labor intensive.
You're building new cell towers, managing countless failed backhual links (thanks to fiber's natural enemy, the backhoe), working with whatever obscure bugs your MVNOs have managed to uncover, certifying new cell phone designs, and still working on upgrading everything to 5G while simultaneously planning for 6G (keeping in mind that the 5G network architecture looks radically different than the LTE architecture). Much of that work is necessarily physically distributed across the entire country.
Not to mention dealing with end-user sales and support, which unfortunately often needs physical stores.
I'm not going to say whether 100k is too many, but there's a lot more involved here than just maintenance and monitoring - especially if you want your network capacity to keep up with growing demand.
VZW has 146m lines. Each employee supports 14,600 customers, seems like a reasonable number...
lol. You figured it out, Verizon wireless can just be replaced by a UniFi router and ChatGPT.
ChatGPT can very well be an upgrade compared to the "engineering" capability of a lot of telcos (they have very little, are hell-bent on outsourcing as much as possible and are even proud of that). But don't take it from me, here's a more reliable source: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/