News

"Telecom World War One is over" - Washington comes to terms with also-ran status

"The days when regulation determines who can provide what services to whom is past," commented Jerry Knight of the Washington Post. He was backed up by thinktank founder Scott C. Cleland, chief executive of the Precursor Group: "This is the formal end to the era of managed competition" under government communications regulation.

The story for the Post is a local one:  [registration needed] the city-district used to be a big name in communications, and now, its local star corporations are has-beens.

But the analysis looks beyond the local eclipse of Nextel, MCI and even AOL, and into the way regulators have lost control of the business. "What once was the region's most promising growth industry has been largely reduced to a few struggling providers of phone and Internet services -- more mom-and-pop than Ma Bell -- and some small suppliers of hardware and services to the big boys," Knight laments, but he goes on to quote Cleland:

"Telecom's World War II is underway. This time it's a multi-front war between the phone companies and the cable companies, between the phone companies and the technology companies working on ways to make conventional calling obsolete, and between the phone companies and the Internet."

No analysis of the role of wireless is offered. Sadly, this is probably just another sign of the decline in the local communications business in Washington - losing touch with the world picture.

Actually, the saddest news from that front is the takeover of Nextel by Sprint - a company which pioneered wireless data being swallowed by one which has promised to cut out all that modern flim-flam. And the avalanche of WiFi and the promise of WiMAX - all ignored. Rather sad, really...