Operating Margin

"The top five companies in the Integrated Telecommunication Services industry as ranked by operating margin," by Zacks.

Windstream (NASDAQ:WIN) has an operating margin of 29.2%; revenue of $3.5 billion and sales growth of 31.5%. Windstream has quickly gone from an also-ran rural ILEC made from the remains of Alltel wireline division and Valor to a nationwide ILEC with a vast fiber and business solutions division. Windstream just completed the acquisition of KDL and Norlight and Hosted Solutions data center.

Cincinnati Bell (NYSE:CBB) is the last remaining Bell company with an operating margin of 23.5% on sales of $1.4 billion and sales growth of 4.2%. CBB has also started buying up data centers and Cloud services. It has to: sales growth is 4%. Windstream's growth is acquisition and out-of-region business.

Frontier Communications (NYSE:FTR) has an operating margin of 22.3% on sales of $3 billion. Frontier just took over all of VZ's rural territories.

Ma Bell has an operating margin of 17.3% on $123.9 billion in revenue and sales growth of 2.8%. <-- that's not much growth!