Predicting
Winners in
The Global
Telecommunications
Revolutions

The telcom wars are raging. Giant telephone companies face off against rebel resellers and callback operators. Mega-mergers and international grand alliances are occurring so quickly that even the telecom employees can't keep track of who's on whose side. But the victor is nowhere near the battlefield.

In the U.S., while the telcos fight each other on television over who's saving who what, the real winner is calmly calling across the Atlantic for 20 cents a minute. Whether it's a business person in Denmark e-mailing a client in another continent, or a college student calling from home overseas, the consumer is the greatest benefactor of this fast-paced competition, driving prices downward and pushing quality skyward.

In the battle for customers, telcos are offering innovative technologies and services at rates never imagined a decade ago.

With a high stake in the outcome, consumers may want a ringside seat at this fracas. The musclebound Goliath might look like a better bet than the kid with a slingshot. But predicting a winner isn't always so easy. Sometimes it requires a look at history. Or pre-history.

Do the giant telecommunication companies, wallowing in their regulated home turf and dragging the burden of their aging technology along with them, bear a resemblance to the dinosaurs of old? Even in deregulated markets, the legacy of their government protected past endows these giants with an intrinsic inflexibility which is out of step with the modern world.

As the telcoms climate changes, the big monopolies no longer enjoy the old warm Jurassic Park environment of protective structures and tariffs. The accompanying huffing and puffing in the market place line of the multi billion dollar mergers looks like the ponderous mating dances of prehistoric times. These grand alliances tend not to address the consumers demand for cost effective alternatives, innovative enhanced features and better service.

Today's marketplace clearly favors the smaller, more adaptable company. While the telcom behemoths attempt to tighten their grip on the industry, innovative technology-driven companies are offering consumers greater choices at lower prices. New techniques are being developed daily: transparent callback, voice over the internet, cellular and PCS, cable service delivery and direct bidirectional low earth orbit (LEO) and computer telephony integration.

These advances are user-driven, because people have jobs that were unthought of as little as ten years ago. Many consumers feel that the big telecom corporations are unable or unwilling to adapt to the current demands placed on the industry.

Only companies with the ability to acclimate to an ever-changing market will prevail. Small, dynamic new companies with unfamiliar names like Netscape and Telegroup, Cisco and Bay Networking are developing big market shares.

By Fred Gratzon

When Alex Graham Bell invented the telephone, few people believed the new technology could fit into the business world's formal, reliable and time-consuming paper trail. They were right. The telephone did not fit in, it simply changed everything.

Telecommunications is still transforming the business world, in fact the entire world community at lightning speed in the 1990s. This is the start of the first true global telecommunications buyers' market the world has ever known. The real winner in the global telecommunications revolution is the consumer. But it is the scrawny little mammals, the dynamic new companies in communications who are speeding this victory to you, not the dinosaurs.

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