As an "expert" in telecom, he should really know better. Nobody is under the illusion that regional telecom companies are some sort of tech hubs. Of course they

As an "expert" in telecom, he should really know better. Nobody is under the illusion that regional telecom companies are some sort of tech hubs. Of course they're not. They don't have the economies of scale -- unless they become a gigantic monopoly such as AT&T and then get broken up anyway. Or, in the case of AT&T again, if they just helped create an entirely new industry so that they have to build everything themselves because there is nobody else to do it anyway. But this is just a historical curiosity. The telecom industry is obviously not in this state today. What incentives does a small, geographically limited service provider has to spend so much on R&D? So that they can get try to make awkward licensing deals for their awesome tech if they strike gold and get to be the first to develop 5G? This makes very little sense. Telecom equipment vendors are an actual thing. They're just not that well known to public. For the optical backbone, you have the likes of Ciena, Juniper, Infinera, ADVA, etc. (More well-known Nokia and Cisco are also heavy players there.) These companies are all system integrators themselves, and have their own degree of vertical integration. There are component vendors which specialize even more, although they are increasingly getting gobbled up through consolidation in the sector. This is partly because people figured that it makes little sense to develop the same transceivers or modems at 10 different companies when you can instead merge them and combine the R&D budgets, patents, and manufacturing know-how. This is the same reason we don't have 20 CPU manufacturers. This is advanced stuff with high R&D costs. His argument seems to be that it'd be nice to just have more people work in this field at regional telecom companies, because then some areas like parts of Europe wouldn't be deprived of a tech sector. The reality is that we don't need a very large workforce to develop the most high-end stuff, and tech, especially the high-end non-consumer grade variety, really is a winner-takes-all market when it comes down to it. There is nothing preventing a big telecom service providers from buying any of these system vendors. That would also be very expensive and subject to heavy regulatory scrutiny to ensure proper competition in the market (buying a system vendor and then blocking the sales or price gouging your competitors being a big no-no). But there again people figured out in the 80s and 90s that conglomerates are actually less, not more efficient. Everyone is better off specializing in their own thing. The tech inclined people end up joining those companies instead, and that's really for the best. Is he really arguing that innovation and tech doesn't exist in the field? Where does he think it comes from? Some unnamed office in Shenzhen? Besides Huawei or ZTE, not really.