And who exactly does this leave? You guessed it. The old-style telcos. They've done just enough to keep their toes in the new IP world. They've set up ISP divisions, or bought them, when market conditions made them cheap enough. They've moved some or all of their backbone traffic onto IP networks, which turns out to give them savings on things like voice traffic, which they are then at liberty to pass on to users when they feel like it.

I recently spoke to one of the founders of Ebone, a Dane called Christian Moeller. "It's very sad how Ebone ended up," he said. "The Ebone business was EBITDA positive throughout its period owned by GTS. The industry will have to move on."

And what direction is it moving? From the sound of it, the same direction as Moeller himself, who is now European director of Sprint, a 100-year old US telecoms company. "In 2002 users will shift towards quality and redundancy, and look closely at the financial stability of their suppliers," he said.

In other words, in network provision, the telco-heads learned just enough to win out after all.

Or have they?

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

idealists with them.

And who exactly does this leave? You guessed it. The old-style telcos. They've done just enough to keep their toes in the new IP world. They've set up ISP divisions, or bought them, when market conditions made them cheap enough. They've moved some or all of their backbone traffic onto IP networks, which turns out to give them savings on things like voice traffic, which they are then at liberty to pass on to users when they feel like it.

I recently spoke to one of the founders of Ebone, a Dane called Christian Moeller. "It's very sad how Ebone ended up," he said. "The Ebone business was EBITDA positive throughout its period owned by GTS. The industry will have to move on."

And what direction is it moving? From the sound of it, the same direction as Moeller himself, who is now European director of Sprint, a 100-year old US telecoms company. "In 2002 users will shift towards quality and redundancy, and look closely at the financial stability of their suppliers," he said.

In other words, in network provision, the telco-heads learned just enough to win out after all.

Or have they?

Among my acquaintance, the kind of people who were most interested in Internet-versus-telco ideology ten years ago (or would have been if they were out of school then) are now much more interested in using 802.11 wireless LANs than to cut them out altogether.

So there may still be hope.

Do you agree that the telcos will prevail? TalkBack below or e-mail us with your thoughts.

Previous page |   1 2 3

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[an error occurred while processing this directive]