It's 1970 all over again in the telecom industry

Submitted by acohill on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 09:47

AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile, which would make AT&T the biggest cellular provider in the U.S. Meanwhile, CenturyTel wants to buy Qwest. The 1984 breakup of Ma Bell and the 1996 telecom deregulation is slowly being undone as telecom in the United States is re-aggregated into enormous monopolies with antiquated business models based on maintaining a monopoly by any means possible. The incumbents are not going away, and I continue to believe the telecom giants could be turned into viable, useful businesses if they changed their basic business models, but that does not seem to be happening. When small companies like Frontier (which has buying up big chunks of Verizon's rural service areas) and CenturyTel are able to buy much bigger incumbents, it is a sign that these businesses are failing. Meanwhile, legislators are eager to prop up these businesses with legislation of the kind trying to be passed in North Carolina that prohibits communities from trying to take their economic future in their own hands. It is an absolute disaster for rural America.