India unreal: Jio goes for 50M FTTH in 1100 cities, already 215M 4G and 96+% covered
Audited financials* report a profit with prices of $2-10/month. Rio sells with feature phones from $30 and smartphones from $60. Ambani offers LTE to 96% of India, confirmed independently by OpenSignal. heading to 99%. No government subsidy, ET predicts prices will start at $8.
If India can do this with a $7K per capita income, so can Poland $29K per capita, Malaysia $28K, Argentina $20K, Mexico $19K, Dominican Republic $17K, Egypt $13K, Indonesia $12K, and many, perhaps most, of the 110 countries with higher incomes than India. Myanmar, one of the world's poorest, is over 90% covered and will soon be 95% LTE. Less than that is a government failure.
The primary secret is the incredibly low costs of today's wireless networks. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam says his current cost per bit is 90% less than just a couple of years ago.
Datang, like the Tang dynasty that inspired the name, exits with remarkable achievements. The Tang Dynasty introduced woodblock printing and many of the first manuscripts. The Tang poets remain admired after a millennium. Datang has played a crucial role in wireless since developing the TD-SCDMA standard before 2007*. That was extended to 4G TD-LTE, which is the basis in turn for much of mid-band 5G. In fact, when the technology was developed for wireless in the 3.5 GHz band, it was called TD-LTE.
I didn't believe it until I double-checked the figures. Telefonica Spain added 500,000 homes passed by fibre to the home in Q1 2018 to reach 19.7M. Three months later, they are almost certainly over 20M, over 75% of Spain. They are now making more money per customer (EBITDA,) seeing less churn, and reducing operating expenses on the new network. The financial results were so favorable the Brazilian subsidiary, VIVO, is also adding 7M. VIVO's total will be 14M by 2020. 
Xavi is riding to the rescue after Free lost 19,000 broadband subscribers in Q1, an almost inconceivable result after 16 years of success. He's bringing back some of the original team, including legendary engineer Rani Assaf. They have work to do: opening Italy & Ireland, transitioning from 4G to ?, and dealing with invigorated competitors. Even Bouygues seems to be coming back. 
Update: May 13: Trump blinked. He tweeted, "Too many jobs in China lost,. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!" Previous: The maximum cost to keep the company going for two years would be about $10B if they didn't sell a single product. With some fast engineering work and smart management, survival would cost less than $5B.