I contracted at one of the Bellcore spinoffs for a while. You're not really going to get anything resembling innovation out of them. They're mature businesses l

I contracted at one of the Bellcore spinoffs for a while. You're not really going to get anything resembling innovation out of them. They're mature businesses left over from the last millenium, optimized to extract maximum cash from existing products. They also benefit from regulatory capture - the CTO where I was used to spend a lot of time in DC. Competing on tech capabilities is just not what they do. Sure, operators upgrade their networks from 3G to 4G to 5G, but they're not the ones driving that innovation, they're just deploying stuff developed at other companies like Qualcomm and Ericsson.