In my many years of covering business and technology, I’ve yet to encounter an industry as strange as wireless carriers. They are simultaneously successful and yet perpetually unhappy with their very trade. They spend tens of billions to build out huge cellular and Wi-Fi networks, and boast that they use smart network technology to serve their customers. But they constantly worry about being just a “dumb pipe.”

Take AT&T, the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier. While it trails Verizon a bit, an estimate of total subscribers at the end of its third quarter shows AT&T with 133 million customers, more than the next two biggest players, Sprint and T-Mobile, combined.

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