One of my favorite quotes is from the movie "Dirty Dancing", "Lots of changes though Max, lots of changes". Nowhere is that more true than in the Telecom industry. Telecom has gone through some amazing changes in the last 24 years. My career started in 1982 with a telecommunications distributor in North Carolina. A couple of years later the government "experiment" in dealing with a monopoly caused the great AT&T breakup. From where I'm sitting, that 1984 court-ordered breakup has been coming apart for years and with the wonderful advantage of hindsight, the competitive industry imposed by the enforced breakup can be seen as pretty much a failure.
Then along comes the Telecommunications Act of 1996 where the regional Bell companies had to share their networks with competitors at discounted prices. This was an attempt to encourage more competition among telecom carriers. Then the FCC decided that the network-sharing rules weren't fair to the Bell companies because it discouraged them from investing in new technologies and discouraged competitors from investing in their own facilities.
Don't get me wrong; I think the 90's were the most prosperous of times in telecom, especially if you were in manufacturing or distribution, but as most of you know this "competition" lead to the onslaught of so many new networks across the country that the great telecom depression of 2001 was inevitable.
But things are a little better, don't you think? With all the mergers and acquisitions going on we're pretty much right back where we started from in 1984. Everything eventually comes around full circle...especially in telecom.
"Lots of changes though Max, lots of changes"
