Procurement power
By Sid Carr and Robert Tevelson
In the face of consolidation, competition and technology evolution, expectations for procurement are taking a step forward. (Click here for the full, extended version of this article from our print issue.)...
Junk this
Vince Vittore
When Standard & Poor's lowered the credit ratings of General Motors and Ford to junk status earlier this month...
The search for an upside
By Jason Meyers
A study released this week by Insight Research points to a new and disturbing trend for carriers: Even as service provider subscribership is increasing, revenue growth isn't keeping pace...
Optical eclipse
By Ed Gubbins
Nortel Networks, one of the world's leading optical equipment vendors, becomes less optical with each passing year, a trend evident in the company's revenue, its research-and-development spending and its workforce....
What's left for Qwest?
By Jason Meyers
Earlier this week, Qwest Communications abandoned the bidding battle for MCI it was waging with Verizon. Carol Wilson's Broadband Reality newsletter on Monday outlined the reasons and the likely impact a business services duopoly will have on enterprise telecom options...
The MCI inevitability
By Carol Wilson
Qwest Communications' decision to abandon its pursuit of MCI comes as no real surprise. MCI's Board of Directors had made it quite clear that it was only going to accept Qwest's money if forced to...
Fiber hires
By Ed Gubbins
In this week's issue of Telephony magazine, I ranted about the persistence of layoffs and downsizing in telecom at this stage of its recovery. And with good cause...
Long goodbye
By Ed Gubbins
What year is it? In the dour, downsizing months of 2001 and 2002, most telecom employees probably prayed for 2005 to come so that the industry recovery would restore their job security...
Strange bedfellows and natural enemies
By Vince Vittore
This week, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told the assembled masses at the National Association of Broadcasters convention that telcos and broadcasters are natural partners as part of the effort to bring advanced digital technologies to local customers...
So you want to write a VoIP RFP
By David H. Yedwab and Jay Brandstadter
Sooner or later, any enterprise or organization will have to come to grips with a request for proposal (RFP) or equivalent for VoIP acquisition. Certainly some have already been down this road, and what follows are lessons learned...
Acceptable fate
By Tim McElligott
MCI is the Augie March of telecommunications. The character, created by the recently departed Chicago-bred, Pulitzer Prize-winning Saul Bellow, was somewhat...
National network security
By Asa Hutchinson
Typically, a business takeover is of interest only to Wall Street and shareholders. In the ongoing battle over MCI, there is much more at stake...
Everybody, have you Hurd?
By Tim McElligott
MVNO warning signs
By Jason Meyers
MCI smackdown
By Carol Wilson
Regardless of who wins the battle, the ongoing face-off between Qwest Communications' Richard Notebaert and Verizon Communications' Ivan Seidenberg over...
The new RBOCs
By Ed Gubbins
As AT&T combines with SBC, it's time once again to choose a taxonomic name for the new species...
Now comes the hard part
By John Hanson
Numerous studies have shown that many acquisitions fail to fulfill management's expectations or generate economic value for the buyer. So what is the...
MCI and everything after
By Jason Meyers
I suppose it's already unoriginal to point out the irony of MCI--the telecom industry's original upstart--getting acquired by an offspring of the Bell System...
Cisco the consolidator?
By Vince Vittore
The Wall Street Journal last week ran a lengthy article focused on the potential vendor consolidation that could come with the mergers of large Bell companies with long distance providers...
When merger is madness
By Carol Wilson
The best time to score against a good basketball team is when their starters are on the bench. Whether the big guy's in foul trouble or the point guard just needs a breather--either way, their absence represents an opportunity. Winning teams takes advantage of such chances...
Oedipus Tex
By Tim McElligott
Long gone are the days when Ma Bell or ComEd or Indiana Gas and Electric or any other utility would get a compliment like this: "Johnny Carson was like a public utility. At the end of the day, you wanted him to be there."...
The end of something
By Jason Meyers
Overlooked somewhat in the news about the telecom service provider behemoths spending tens of billions of dollars to become even more colossal is how it all could dramatically alter the long-term business prospects of network technology developers...
The 'S' word
By Vince Vittore
The echoes of Ed Whitacre and Dave Dorman were still in the air and already the buzzword of years past had made its reappearance--synergies...
Seeing the new future
By Carol Wilson
If big deals are like bad luck, and always come in threes, Chicago need to brace itself for something stupendous...
The perils of impairment
By Daniel Berninger
It is a sad commentary that AT&T and MCI have found that writing down the value of assets was one sure way to improve profitability...
