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For Comcast only about 40%. It would have been 50% but they were forced to spend nearly 13% of revenue on capital expenditure. It must suck to work so had for so little - a mere 33% growth. They lost -9% of their customers despite investing -10% more in infrastructure in Q2. And then the government even has the gall to tax them -50% in 2017!

The article stretches to get $48 Billion and the press release says "spend well in excess of $50 billion" with more announcements coming in their January earnings report, so even at the most generous, there is still a gap there.

The article does not stretch to get to $48 billion, they use that figure to show that even if Comcast stops increasing their investments year over year they will invest $48 Billion over the next five years. Comcast's third quarter results, which were cited in the article, shows they have increased investment by 4.2% compared to 2016. If they continue that growth, they will invest $52 billion over the next five years. And even that is a pessimistic figure because it assumes Comcast's growth will remain constant and not accelerate.

There is no gap, and you are the one stretching to find a narrative where Comcast's stated motives are true. Plenty of corporations made similar claims for how they would spend the 2004 repatriated money, and in the end there were no significant increases in investment but were significant reductions in payroll. Likely because of the increased automation and mergers the repatriated money made possible.

Lobbying amounts are in the millions (for example, $14M for Comcast). Revenues are in the billions ($80B for Comcast's 2016 yearly revenue), margin of 40%. So they are spending fractions of their revenue to drive legislation that they can in turn use to drive more profits.

Profits aren't inherently bad (I work for a private company, after all) but combining granted monopoly power with buying legislation to increase profits is just obscene.

Sources:
Lobbying spend by Comcast: https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...
Comcast earnings and margin: http://www.cmcsa.com/earningde...

Stock is near it's 52-week high.

Why wonder? Let's check. According to CNN/Money, as of February, Comcast had 27.7MM total subscribers. According to Comcast's most recent proxy statement, CEO Brian Roberts made $36.2MM in total compensation. That works out to $1.31 per subscriber per year, or 11 cents per bill.

If we factor in the remainder of the executive team--CFO Michael J. Cavanagh, Neil Smit, President & CEO of Comcast Cable Communications, Sr. Executive VP David L. Cohen and (apparently still collecting a paycheque for 2015) former Chairman & CFO Michael J. Angelakis, and excluding NBCUniversal CEO Stephen B. Burke--we get total executive compensation of $142.9MM, which still works out to only $5.16/year, or 43 cents per bill.

Now, as only $9.7MM of that (7%) is "salary," is that an awful lot of job-well-done payout for a company with such consistently dismal customer satisfaction ratings? Sure. But it's not a major line item per bill.

Interestingly, the biggest golden parachute Roberts can get comes if he's disabled on the job: $133MM. $70.6MM to his next of kin if he dies in office, and barely cab fare home of $27.5MM if they fire his ass. So the (no doubt also well-paid) cleaning staff of Comcast HQ had better be very careful with those Wet Floor signs.

Comcast had $19.269 billion in revenues last quarter. (Source) This equates to about $211 million per day or $8.8 million per hour. They'll earn back the $2.3 million fine in about 15 minutes and 42 seconds.

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For Comcast, yes, their amusement parks, tv shows, movies etc have a profit of 17%. Then look at this: http://www.cmcsa.com/annuals.c... - annual report, page 122.
      Their cable operations – which is what we are talking about – has operational margins of 26%. Much fatter than the other lines of business.

“Natural Monopoly” was coined by economist, not politicians. They are not saying that monopolies are natural, rather that there are many different types of monopolies, and that natural monopolies are a particular type.

To your point about the water supply, I think you are missing the point. There are competing water firms out there (oddly, Enron was one of them) but that does not really matter. A city could have dozen water firms but only one is going to serve you. They are the sole provider to you unless you move to another town. (I would classify moving to another part of town to switch water companies as a high “transactional cost”, which is a classic sign of a monopoly)

What you want to do is pull out a book on game theory. If the stable condition of a system is to have one dominate player you have a monopoly. I will point to 19th century London. They had two private water companies, each running a separate pipe under each home. You can have competition but it is not stable in this case. One company drove the other out of business, dug themselves a deep economic moat, and reaped the profits.

For AT&T is there any particular aspect you wanted me to look at? I am assuming you are referring to MCI and the 1974 antitrust suit. Because what I take away from that is that to break a deeply entrench monopoly like AT&T you need a radical change in technology (fiber optics, digital switching equipment), government action, and 20 years. I would counter with Carlos Slim, one of the richest men of the world and while not technically a monopoly, nobody can seem to dislodge his phone operations.

For Comcast, yes, their amusement parks, tv shows, movies etc have a profit of 17%. Then look at this: http://www.cmcsa.com/annuals.c..., annual report, page 122.
  Their cable operations – which is what we are talking about – has operational margins of 26%. Much fatter than the other lines of business.

Comcast's beef is that the Netflix way of providing media will eventually replace Cable TV. Cable TV is their true business and they get almost double the revenue from it compared to broadband (last year it was actually over double). The more they can treat broadband like cable TV service the more they can profit from it.