For bigness' sake

Remember picking teams in gym class? I hated it. The two captains would always choose every fast, big, good or dirty player in the class first, leaving everyone else-the stragglers, the space cadets and the ball-duckers-to stand idly by, the last-picked, wondering what cruel joke fate had played on us (I was a ball-ducker myself). Even though I'm sure teachers did it to make the teams more balanced, standing there pitifully seemed much more unfair.

In the past few months, and certainly in the past few weeks, we've watched the biggest and best telecom players pick their teammates. In some cases, like AT&T with both Tele-Communications Inc. and BT, the player is choosing teammates that have skills different from its own. Others, like GTE and Bell Atlantic, refer to their joining as the "merger of equals," while the SBC/Ameritech and MCI/WorldCom deals seem closest to the idea of getting bigger for bigness' sake.

But after the long-distance captains have grabbed up the best international and local cable company players; after Bell regional holding companies have picked their counterparts to come over to their sides, who will be left standing on the sidelines? Certainly the peer pressure must be hitting U S West and BellSouth just about now, not to mention Sprint. And where will this leave the competitive local exchange carriers, which are just starting to show their talents?

It's clear that the urge to merge will drive the larger carriers to find bigger and better teammates until we're left with just a few huge rivals. But don't underestimate those CLECs. Pure, fair competition is still in the hearts of regulators, and we have yet to see how tough those smaller players can be, no matter what kind of mammoth teams they're up against. Even now, many of them are teaming up with Internet service providers to offer applications those big guys haven't had time to develop in all their merger madness. So it's actually the CLECs that are delivering the newest, high-demand solutions to the customer-something RHC leaders tout as the reason behind all this teaming.

"Size, while it's important, isn't the only thing," said Bell Atlantic's Ivan Seidenberg last week, later adding, "It's the customer that's driving these transactions."

If only we'd had such lofty reasons to team up in 6th grade gym.