Ever been told by a parent or teacher to “wipe that smirk off your face”? I have. Of course, I thought my parents were speaking Russian and wondered what in tarnation a “smirkoff” was. Did it have something to do with the bottles I had seen in the kitchen with silver labels and red letters reading “Smirnoff”? (But I knew better than to put that stuff anywhere near my face — at least back then.) It wasn't until after I learned the hard way how unpleasant it can be for an adult to wipe the smirk off your face for you that I wanted to find out what put it there and why they hated it so much.

Turns out that a smirk comes from one of two things (and sometimes both). It comes from knowing something no one else in the room knows or from knowing something you weren't supposed to know. It can be the most delicious feeling in the world. I love a good smirk. And I haven't in years seen a better smirk than the one on the cover of this issue.

I'm guessing it is because Embarq's Dan Hesse knows something no one else in the room does or is as confident about. Perhaps he knows that converged wireline and wireless services and a little innovation can save the day for incumbent wireline providers who are bleeding access lines at a national average of 7%.

It takes a strong connection to one's inner child to develop a smirk that good, and in Ed Gubbins' cover story on page 14, you'll find Hesse has that and more.

Throughout this issue are examples of people confident that they know something few others do — or at least are comfortable enough with their knowledge to act on it. The opening piece by Kevin Fitchard highlights the daring of Cincinnati Bell to become the first operator in the U.S. to deploy an unlicensed mobile access network. Sarah Reedy's story on page 10 shows that being from Wisconsin doesn't mean you don't know a few things of your own, as evidenced by Green Bay's Nsight Telservices IPTV launch. TDS Telecom talks on page 8 about its copper-saving techniques for mid-band Ethernet, and experts from the CoBank Conference on pages 10 and 12 do what experts everywhere do when asked for their opinions: They give them.

Starting on page 22 are two stories about Alaskan service providers Copper Valley Telephone and Yukon Telephone. And on our back page is one of Alaska's own, Margie Bauman, reporter for the Alaska Journal of Commerce, with an appreciation of how far communications has come in the land where she first began covering forest fires and now calls home.

I am now of the opinion that everyone in Alaska wears a bit of a smirk, even when they hide it. And that can be the best of all smirks. It comes partly from knowing that they have what it takes to thrive there. They definitely know something the rest of us will never know — and they are keeping it to themselves.