When Telecom Mergers Hit Home 131
netbuzz writes "A telecom manager submitted an essay to Network World that paints a sadly humorous picture of what the mega-telecom mergers really mean on the ground." From the article: "Well, when I heard that these companies were about to combine forces, it made my blood run cold. How would they be able to take, in each case, two companies with already broken processes and mediocre customer support and successfully merge them? How could they continue to provide me with the support I need to keep my company's networks functioning as they need to in this age of the bandwidth junkie? The answer ... at this moment, is they can't!"
Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, did anyone really expect that consumers wouldn't be harmed by all the telecom mergers? Monopolies are always bad for consumers, which is why they are so heavily regulated. Since there can be no practical competition to a land line phone provider, the only choices that aren't inherently harmful to consumers are A. highly regulated monopoly, B. government-run monopoly, C. a non-profit cooperative.
Stop with this foolish deregulation before it's too late....
There's an old saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
This merger frenzy is now creating corporate organisms with an exponentially larger number of hands.
What do we expect?
Maybe Fox can do a special about it and call it "when corporate bureaucracies attack!"
Re:Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
This is great (Score:5, Insightful)
Mergers (Score:4, Insightful)
This is obviously retarded. They end up losing a lot of money during the merger because of this. Another problem is that a lot of companies will say something like, "Ok. Now that you're a part of us, go make us some money. Bitch." Never mind that they pretty much just cut the throat of the company, leaving it with very little ability (or authority!) to do anything.
Re:Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
Ludicrous. Reminder, this is the telecom provider market. That means there will ALWAYS be monopolies - its the nature of the beast, like road, sewer, water, and energy providers. Regulation of those natural monopolies creates regulated monopolies. De-regulation of those natural monopolies creates unregulated monopolies.
Pick your posion, but don't pretend that deregulation will magically prevent monopolies from forming in a market where natural monopolies are unavoidable.
Re:Come On... (Score:3, Insightful)
Telecomm customer service and response has NEVER been good, so why call it into question in light of recent mergers?
Both of the issues exemplified in the article were new issues arising from the fact that because of the merger the new company could no longer provide services they once did. Since there is no competition due to the merger, I'd say it is reasonable to call into question how much the merger has crippled the ability of businesses to acquire and use these services. This is concrete harm to the consumer and the economy. It is always worthwhile to question the decisions made by the government to see if they are doing their job. It seems in this case they are not.
Re:give them what they want (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)
Hrm... I'm pretty sure the grand parent just said that. He said the monopolies that aren't bad for consumers are the ones that are heavily regulated.
And in your statement, the following is also true about harmful monopolies... The telcoms have in place extremley high barriers to competition. Not only is this the nature of the industry (no one is going to spend millions to make their own network any time soon), but they also are using government to keep this in place such as the banning of municipal wifi networks around the nation.
Re:give them what they want (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent post really does give good advice. My provider (Speakeasy), for instance, uses its private network for all its VoIP and has decent QoS. So no, SBC can't degrade my VoIP traffic. Are they as cheap as SBC or Verizon? No, they're actually a fair bit more expensive. But that is how I choose to vote with my dollar. And when I left SBC I let them know exactly why I was leaving. Poor customer service, one arm of the company not knowing what the other arm was doing, etc. I've never, ever had any customer service issues with my current provider. It's definitely possible to find a provider that doesn't rely on SBC or Verizon, povided you live in a fairly major urban area.
Competition (Score:3, Insightful)
If Janet Ley had a real alternative to Verizon and ATT, don't you think she'd be taking it?
If a company has real competition, what happens when it blows off its customers? It goes out of business. Are the incumbent telephone companies out of business?
Re:Why all the fuss... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why all the fuss about the telecom mergers/aqusitions? It is the nature of a free market that some companies will win and others lose.
What exactly do you think the merger of two government enforced monopolies into a larger government enforced monopoly has to do with a "free market?" The free market is not operating on phone companies. AT&T was not taken down by the free market, they were split up by the government for breaking the law and because the situation was so bad everyone had to rent their telephone as well as pay high rates for crappy service.
Re:Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)
Stossel did a 1 hour episode on ABC that showed the various municipalities that de-regulated the water source, and water became cheaper and safer. Many cities are partially deregulating their bus services (buying the busses and then leasing them to competitive businesses for operation) and the costs are dropping 50% while service quotas are kept and beat. California allowed a private tollway to be built which was a huge success before California grabbed it back and screwed it up again.
The proof of privatization comes from other areas. After the airlines were deregulated, the costs fell. Look at subsidies: Airlines now get about $6 per 10,000 miles flown. Greyhound gets about $4 per 10,000 miles driven. Amtrack gets $200 for the same 10,000 miles, and Amtrak is 100% regulated. When Amtrak was created in 1971, the train industry was hurting because of cars and busses and airplanes, but it was still viable. Amtrak destroyed the competitive market and is now completely run by unionized management who asks for more and more money. The last year of Amtrak that was audited had fewer riders than their first year.
Even beyond that look at what privatization has done. When the TV cartel was opened to competition, cable TV came in and slaughtered the old system, replacing 5-10 channels with hundreds. Cable then became a regulated media and the growth slacked until recently as cable companies started to find competitive ways to sell their regulated product. If the regulations were dropped, I bet we'd see many new and competitive features introduced.
The PC market is a mostly unregulated market. The areas that are most regulated tend to have the highest cost products with the least amount of choice. The cost of a PC has dropped enormously.
Re:Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score:2, Insightful)