The entrepreneurial takeaway: until this three-way tug-of- war is resolved, content and communications companies must remain completely pipe-agnostic.
The AT&T bid for MediaOne, coming one month after the announced Comcast/MediaOne merger, illustrates how threatened the telecom companies are by the migration of information traffic to Internet technologies.
AT&T is trying, with this attempted acquisition and with the TCI acquisition, to buy up the bandwidth and wires that now reach directly into homes and businesses. It's easier to get those connections through these acquisitions than it would be to deal with the local telcos directly, not to mention the regulatory and technical challenges that would entail.
The borders between the Internet, telecom, and broadcast industries continue to blur. Today, each industry owns a piece of the total communications equation. But tomorrow, you may be getting your phone service from your ISP, video from a phone company, and Internet access from a local telco. (Or, more realistically, all of the above from one
source.)
AT&T won't pull this one off, cough, errr if they do, then the FCC has lost a few spokes I didn't know about. <smiling>
Temp'
|
