<<I often correspond with colleagues in parts of the world where less than 10 or 20 percent of homes have basic telephone service, and where there may or may not be electrical power from a grid. To me, these are really the big challenges and opportunities in the global telecommunications market - and not whether we can watch movies on demand or download images in milliseconds rather than multiminutes.>>
Ray, you raise an excellent point. IMO, not only are such advanced services luxuries that we probably CAN live without (at least for a few more years), but the aggregate market for POTS in the developing world, where most people have never even placed a single phone call in their entire lives, probably justifies RBOC fascination with international opportunities. Since you have quite a bit of international telcom knowledge and experience, I would like to ask you a couple of questions. Given the extraordinary power of the host nation to impede or to facilitate the buildout of local infrastructure to achieve the goal of efficient communication to all citizens at reasonable cost, I was wondering which countries you feel have been particularly good in implementing policies that you feel may actually be better than ours in the USA and which countries you feel have regressive policies in this area. I would be particularly interested in any thoughts you might have about Israel and the extremely high cellular penetration rates achieved through very competitive pricing. (Not sure how local telecom regs fit in here -- may simply be local competitive factors at work or aggressive price elasticity of demand assumptions.)
I would also be interested in hearing your thoughts about Teledesic and Iridium LEOS and what effect they may have on telcom competition.
Finally, I wonder whether the concept of Universal Service such as we have here in US, has become a standard in other countries, particularly LDCs, and whether you feel it can ever be an appropriate constraint upon laissez-faire capitalism.
Thanks, as always, for your insightful comments.
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