ON BORING GEEKS

Telecom is a community. As such, there are certain labels that are considered permissible among community insiders but should be unacceptable when used by outsiders. It's high time we addressed the use of the word “geek” — and, to a lesser degree, the word dinosaur — when it comes to that community within a community known as the Bell companies.

Christine Heckart, president of telecom consultancy TeleChoice, had this to say in a Webcast hosted last month by Net.com: “Telecom has largely been a very boring industry for about a hundred years. It's been hidden and rather geeky.”

I don't know, now that she dwells among the analysts, whether Heckart's years at WilTel qualify her as a community insider any more than my years at Ameritech qualify me as an insider — especially now that I, too, am on the outside looking in. Either way, we are both guilty of throwing around the g-word. And we should stop.

It's not just out of respect for what that community has accomplished. I don't know what makes a switching engineer or operations grunt any geekier that the router rats or Java junkies that represent the future. The latter has just turned in their pocket protectors for Palm Pilots.

Heckart also called the Bells big, stodgy, fat, slow-moving dinosaurs. They may be just that — they did drag their lumbering feet to the DSL race, and they don't appear in any hurry to finish. They continue to meander over to the world of optics and packet-based technology. They don't create new services at the pace experts say they should.

And Heckart was right when she said that when telecom was thrust from the depths of boringness into the spotlight of the Internet and the stock market, it didn't respond very well. She said, “They were encouraged to make very bad decisions because it would increase their market value… and the tremendous greed and appetite for telecom stock created largely a fake market.”

I agree that the whole industry was awestruck with the attention it got over the last few years. And mistakes were made. But it is becoming evident to me that, except for a couple of major legacy equipment providers, most of the mistakes were made by those bearing Palm Pilots. So I am beginning to wonder whether boring is such a bad thing.

Maybe the Bells have good reason to move slowly. Maybe they know something about long-term survival that is still lost on the newer generation. They certainly have vendors eating out of their hands, and they have warded off the first wave of CLECs. Wouldn't the Bell companies be in trouble now if they were halfway through a major migration to a next-gen infrastructure only to have their supporting vendors too worried about survival to support them? Maybe they just got lucky.