Kurosawa Revisited

Radsoft 19 July 2002

So the dust is settling. The talking heads say WorldCom will be bankrupt on Monday 22 July 2002. That should be the biggest 11 in the history of this very messed up planet. It's been twenty-one years since Ma Bell's business was scattered to the winds. When WorldCom goes, what's left?

The only stable carriers left are the RBOCs - Verizon, BellSouth, SBC, US West (Qwest) - and AT&T and Sprint. AT&T is still biggest by a comfortable margin, and Sprint is in there for going on 30% of the total.

But things aren't calm. Far from it. Both AT&T and Sprint lost big in the cutthroat long distance price wars, and so invested heavily in cable and wireless technologies in a desperate attempt to find new sources of revenue.

But wireless pricing is now as cutthroat as long distance rates, and cable companies are voracious cash eaters, often needing new infrastructures to provide the services being advertised. Laying new fiber is very expensive, and the new head-end equipment installed in central offices isn't much cheaper. And that free cable modem they advertise? It wasn't free to them, that's for sure.

Cable providers have one thing going for them: there is usually no competition in a given area - just like the RBOCs...

So yes, the dust is settling, but that doesn't mean the shake-up is over. For all anyone knows, it could revert back to pre-1981 on its own.