With all due respect to Thomas Wolfe, you can go home again. You just may not recognize the place when you get there. Last week, I returned to the Telephony staff after a 10-year absence to find that just about everything is different. The downtown Chicago building where I now work is much nicer than the old digs, my office has a view of Lake Michigan (at least until the Trump tower blocks out the sun), the few staff members remaining from my day have a lot less hair, and the toddler pictures that once adorned my desk have been replaced by those of teenagers.

Not everything has changed. Telephony's focus remains the same, as does its commitment to excellence. But the market we cover couldn't be more different.

Ten years ago, we were writing about how service provider initiatives were trying to bring more bandwidth into the home. Technologies such as asymmetric DSL and fiber-to-the-curb were being debated. There was even discussion of the impact of competition in the local loop, as a handful of competitive access providers became more aggressive in luring business customers away from the Bell companies, which were taking their own initiative by courting Hollywood through a consortium intent on bringing interactive video into homes. Cable companies were promising to use their new digital networks to bring voice, data, video and cheap pizza into the home via interactive full-service networks.

The fact that this all sounds vaguely familiar is an illusion. Ten years ago, when Telephony wrote about a new technology (like that Internet stuff), it was with a degree of detachment — it was fun to write about hot, new things, and the fact they wouldn't actually impact the market for years allowed you to simply enjoy the glow of innovation for a while.

To say those days are gone is to state the obvious. In this week's issue, when we write about BellSouth's and Verizon's plans for building high-bandwidth networks into customers' homes, we are writing a chapter in the Book of Service Provider Survival. Executives charged with making decisions such as whether to take fiber all the way into the home or to stop at the curb know the continued existence of their companies could hinge on that choice. We certainly have seen enough of the once-invincible crumble to know that there are no guarantees. And we are likely to see more of the same in 2005.

By focusing on broadband services — how they are defined, marketed and sold — I look forward to chronicling those telecom service providers smart and lucky enough to reap the benefits of more than a decade of broadband dreams and devotion. In the nearly 20 years I've been covering telecom, the industry has substantially transformed itself, but I believe the biggest changes are yet to come. And I can't wait to see them.