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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DenverTechie who wrote (11613)	6/26/2001 3:27:44 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Hi DT, Thanks for that very thoughtful reply. I appreciate the technical update on the "life line" provisioning and it sounds like the solution has been decided upon while I was over at the "Laughter is the best Medicine" thread. As to the "vision" of a one-bill provider for local loop, LD, digital entertainment and Internet, I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it sounds awfully convenient. OTOH, I seem to recall the old line about customer service at Ma Bell: "We don't care because we don't have to." Considering the infuriating state of customer service, even from my mom & pop local cableco/ISP, I can only imagine what T would come up with for trouble ticket solutions. I can only imagine that after being put on hold at the end of an endless message tree because there are so many things to go wrong, that I would end up talking to the inexpensive employee of a contract call center vendor in Bangalore or Dublin depending on time of day, and that I and the service rep would be equally powerless to do anything about a network flaw that requires a real live technician. So, you see where I'm coming from on this gigantism thing. It's because I've come to expect a miserable service experience from large corporations. Not that I'm whining. Just an observation. There is an art to the semantics of telecom that I'm glad you have illuminated for me. The distinction between a metro and an access network somehow went right over my head. Much as in the days when I discovered how QCOM was buffaloing me (and anyone else who didn't catch it) when they distinguished bit rates between "mobile" and "portable" uses of cell phones. Who knew that one meant in a vehicle, and the other strolling through an office? QCOM certainly didn't go any distance to make that distinction clear, yet is sure made the hype much more attractive when the quoted everything in "portable" bit rates, which, of course, are dramatically higher than mobile. A tad deceptive? We've both seen worse.... <g> Time that WS was not willing to give. Times may be a'changing, but there are some telco truths that remain self-evident. One of those, I believe, is that ubiquitous last mile access to homes is a precious thing that should not be squandered. Boy, not if you listen to Edward Whitacre, CEO of SBC. He says local residential service is the pits. He'd rather not have anything to do with it, just like the 'lectric ute boys would rather not have anything to do with distributing electricity. Because it's work, and they're interested in shirking as much of that as possible as they seek the low hanging fruit. In SBCs case, the concentrated datacom and commercial voice markets, and for the electric utes, the generation and marketing side. It is a truly funny world when the chief executives of utility companies decide they simply don't want to do the job that their companies were created to do. As regards the two years since Armstrong had his vision of the future..... Well, back then, the telecom industry wasn't in a complete turmoil, LD rates were 150% higher, and everyone who wasn't a permabear saw the bright new future of the Internet driven communications world. Now we know that the Internet revolution was illusory, LD SPs continue to be disintermediated by a multiplicity of competitive schemes, and the telecom industry seems to have taken some monumental wrong turns, such as UMTS. I don't think Armstrong really had much of a choice in the matter. He needed to keep feeding the network jones in order to try to eventually get out of debt, or at least get debt service to parity with positive cash flows. WS is an anticipation machine, and right now WS is anticipating that the debacle in telecom is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. RHK, InStat, CIR, etc. notwithstanding. What I see happening in the next couple of years is a new wave of fierce competition as vulture funds like Promethean move into the SP space and can offer services at pennies on the dollar to the established players who are trying to pay down debts that the Promethean types can wipe out in BK procedings, purchases of distressed bonds and with convertible preferreds to wipe out the existing equity holders. It's going to be a really wrenching couple of years ahead. JMHO, Ray :)