I've worked in the telecommunications industry for 20 years and it is in the worst shape ever. How can that be since 20 years ago, all any of us had was a land line at our homes, possibly a second line for the kids. Now we all have home phones, cell phones, DSL or ISDN internet access. Shouldn't the industry be booming with jobs galore? Yes it should, but thanks to our politicitians its not. Check out the stock prices of Lucent, Worldcom, Marconi, AT&T, etc. They're all in the toilet. Why? When the government split up AT&T in the early 80's, they assumed other businesses would enter the market place to compete. Since it is extremely capital intensive to place cables down every road in America the only competition was in the less capital intensive long distance market with MCI and Sprint. Good for the consumer because our rates went down. 15 years later in the mid 90's still no other businesses want to lay out the capital to compete with a facility based local loop against the remaining Bell companies. Why is that important? Imagine the shot in the arm for this industry and the American economy if companies were investing billions of dollars to build a competitive network. So our brilliant politicians decide the solution is to force the incumbant Bell companies to sell there facilities to their competitors at an apx 50% discount which in turn they can resale these same facilities to the same customers at a 25% discount (this is known as UNE-P pricing within the industry) and pocket the 25% difference without investing any capital. Since the Bells are having to wholesale facilities at below their costs, they have in turn reduced their capital investment (who wants to spend money to lose money?) into their networks by over 50%. The companies that supplied the Bells like Lucent and Marconi are now almost bankrupt. The wholesalers still have no incentive to invest capital since they can siphon off a portion of the market by shuffeling paper. Their only employees are in telemarketing and billing. Everyone is a loser. Colin Powell's son is the current head of the FCC and he is trying to bring about a change to this huge mistake. Please ask your congress person to oppose UNE-P pricing so that we can return the ongoing capital investment into our nation's telecommunications infrastructure so that good folks like Mike and others can return to work. Sorry for the rant, but this has happened to many of my friends and won't be resolved until the rules change.
