Stephen, occasionally I read articles such as the one I'm responding to
here, and I can't help but recall another era in which I was charged with
managing the health and well-being of fledgling carriers and novelty
startups. The principles behind the CLECs and the ITSPs gaining entry into
local and long distance have some precedents, going back to the turn of the
century, and later on, and in my case, a series of evnets that actually
took place during my career.
The circumstances I spell out below parallel the current plight of today's
DSL CLECs and ITSP startuprs, almost to a "T" [no relationship to the
larger player].
The time frame was 1975 thru 1977, during which time I had the distinction
of being knighted Liaison between ATT Long Lines and the then NY Telephone
Company.
My primary focus was initially to ensure half-hour clearing times on loop
and central office transmission troubles for commercial customers of all
types, and a 99.90% met due date performance on new installs and network
rearrangements. Keep in mind that T owned NYTel 100% at the time.
Despite this ownership factor, it was a bear to get the kind of response
needed to satisfy T's objectives, since NYTel had its own performance index
requirements as well as the NY State PSC objectives to meet, and this
caused horrific conflicts between serving the parent and serving the
watching eyes regulators and consumer watch groups.
But there were other factors showing up on the scene that combined and, in
some cases, went beyond these. New startups and the old standbys (MCI, WU,
SPPC, USTS, etc. and about a couple hundred other smaller ones at the time)
were demanding similar levels of service, and were taking T to task in the
courts to get what they wanted, indeed, to get what they absolutely needed,
in order to survive. One might recall the MCI series of anti-trust suits
back then.
This assignment, by the way, had actually begun as a one-year tour of duty
from T, a form of temporary TDY, if you will, but was extended for another
six years due to the turmoil that ensued and my vested knowledge of the
particulars.
The turmoil had nothing to do with the then "inter-company" performance
measurements that I was initially charged with overseeing, rather, it had
to do with my new-found responsibilities in managing certain aspects of the
newer competitors' business operations in such a way that would prove that
NY Tel was not acting in a predatory, or self-serving, manner.
Of course, those were much more primitive times on the technology time
line, but the basic psychological and other human drivers that surround
business decisions that were in place then, prevail today, as well.
One of my charges was a company called Datran [may they RIP], a company
whose products and services were about ten years ahead of their time, or so
it seemed, then.
Between '75 and '76 Datran was selling things like DataDial, a feature that
allowed users to connect to one another via ascii terminal connections on a
wide area network basis in a data pbx kind of setup.
Their main means of optimizing costs was to long term lease "data under
voice" (DUV) spectrum rights from the dominant carriers along their heavy
analog microwave routes... leveraging a part of their unused spectrum at
that time, and hoping to derive benefits in a kind of arbitrage play.
What they were not banking on was the success of AT&T's deployment of
Dataphone Digital Service (DDS) in the summer of '77, and similar offerings
which were unleashed by T's largest competitors in their usual form of
copy-cat manner.
An interesting development in Datran's heavily leveraged business plan was
that the incumbents were actually bending over backwards to meet service
objectives and due dates, but this pup could not compete with the service
reach of T, nor could it deliver on the conveniences associated with
dealing with a single entity.
Billing disputes, especially where rebates and credits were concerned, were
a primary cause of frustration and conflict during that still
manual-intesive period in time.
The company went belly-up, eventually, for many reasons, but primarily
because of over-extended debt and their failure to accurately forecast the
effects of the larger players's services, once the Big Three were good and
ready to come around to competing in earnest. In short, the cash flow
burdens were just too much for them to handle. That's the short and sweet
of it.
What the smaller fry was able to do in the end, however, was to demonstrate
a proof of concept for the larger companies to emulate. I think we've seen
this time and again, prior to, and since, that episode.The question to ask
at this juncture with regard to DSL rollouts and VoIP, and I'm sure this
extends into the Cable Modem and wireless environments as well, is whether
the new-age visions of integrationist sartups in the Internet genre will
hold firm and succeed in defining a new model, OR will they eventually
yield to the Monoliths and to the Empirialists... as others before them
have done?
As always, comments and opinions are welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
