Telecommunications stocks have long been favorites among American investors, both for their sustained growth and their typically lucrative dividend payouts. What many investors don't realize, however, is that U.S. telecom giants now badly lag the rest of the developed world in one key part of the telecommunications sector - broadband Internet service.
Broadband providers in much of the rest of the world offer much faster connections at generally much lower prices. And those overseas players tend to have much more room for growth than the highly saturated U.S. market.
That's why investors who are seeking to maximize their long-term profits from the telecom sector need to start looking at the industry's emerging international players.
"The average U.S. household has to pay an exorbitant amount of money for an Internet connection that the rest of the industrial world would find mediocre," reported a recent issue of Scientific American.
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That magazine report cited a recent study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, which concluded that U.S. broadband service is "not just slower and more expensive than in tech-savvy nations" such as South Korea and Japan, but the U.S. has also "fallen behind infrastructure-challenged countries such as Portugal and Italy."
This disparity has negative implications not just for U.S. Internet users, but also for domestic telecom stocks and, most worrisome, for the United States economy as a whole.
Calling broadband connections "the railroads of the 21st century," the Berkman research study stated that "our creaky Internet makes it harder for U.S. entrepreneurs to compete in the global marketplace."
Berkman researchers noted that the United States is now sorely lacking in the infrastructure required to transmit products - products that these days are information-focused - from seller to buyer. The Berkman report also cited another recent study that showed the U.S. economy coming in "dead last" in a comparison of how quickly over the past decade that 40 countries and regions around the globe have been "progressing toward a knowledge-based economy."
That's a distressing finding - on a number of fronts.
First, this dour landscape speaks to a loss of U.S. focus from just 10 years ago, when American Internet-service providers ranked at or near the top in most studies of Internet price and performance.
Second, it means the United States is experiencing an ongoing market-share decline in a growing global business sector. That sector is expected to advance from $1.7 trillion in 2008 to $2.7 trillion by 2013, according to Plunkett Research Ltd.
"We are at risk in the global race for leadership in innovation," Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a recent address. "Consumers in Japan and France are paying less for broadband and getting faster connections. We've got work to do."
Genachowski's statement is somewhat ironic given that it was a 2002 FCC decision that most observers have identified as the catalyst that touched off the decline of the U.S. broadband sector. At that time, the FCC reclassified broadband systems, stating that they were "information services" rather than "telecommunications services." The decision put Internet services in the category of "content providers," much like MSN, Google and Yahoo!, rather than "communications providers," like telephone companies that own phone lines, satellites and the like.
The result was the elimination of competition. Unlike phone service, where consumers have a wide range of choices in both fixed-line and wireless systems, broadband users generally have only two ways of accessing the Internet - via their cable company or through the phone company. Both options rely heavily on fixed lines that also transmit other types of signals - television, music and phone calls, for instance. And that makes them slower.
By contrast, most other developed nations require companies that own the physical communications infrastructure to sell access to independent Internet providers at wholesale rates - meaning consumers who want high-speed Internet access can choose from among many companies, all of which have to compete in terms of service and price.
Presently, the United States and Mexico are the only two members of the 32-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that don't promote Internet competition.
The FCC is currently considering a change in the rules, but the proposal on the table would still restrict third-party competition, a political concession to existing Internet-service heavyweights like AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA). Those companies now have a virtual monopoly in many areas, but will likely see shrinking margins as a result of market saturation and their inability to offer innovative new products developed in more competitive foreign markets.
Foreign technological advances - and the companies that deliver them - are also being heavily supported by government aid programs.
Despite news stories about potentially restricting access by its citizens, China has committed more than $10 billion to expanding its domestic Internet market. It is also steadily progressing in deployment of its new internal 3G network, providing subsidies for numerous wireless operators, telecom-equipment makers and handset manufacturers.
Similarly, India has just completed an auction of bandwidth spectrums for 3G service and is beginning deployments of the service. Several Central American, Latin American and European countries are also in the process of allocating spectrums for next-generation high-speed systems.
The United States is also supporting Internet expansion through U.S. President Barack Obama's $7.2 billion Broadband Stimulus Program. But the first $4 billion of that was dedicated primarily to expanding broadband access to rural areas and widening the available spectrum size over the next 10 years.
A more likely source of innovation in the U.S. market will come from smaller startup companies built on new ideas - and there are apparently plenty of them around. A Forbes magazine survey conducted in mid-December found that during 2010, venture capitalists poured more money into information technology than any other sector, with telecommunications funding ranking as the third choice for venture investors (just behind healthcare).
Top Global Profit Plays
Given the increasing foreign lead in Internet development and technology, as well as the huge market potential offered by developing economies around the globe, it only makes sense for investors - U.S. and otherwise - to target foreign companies with their telecom investment dollars for the near-term.
Following are several stocks that trade on U.S. exchanges and offer access to highly promising foreign markets.
If putting your money in a single company or country carries too much risk to suit you, there are also exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that focus on the international telecom industry. Here are two:
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