MOMENTUM SHIFT

As any sports fan can tell you, there are always certain moments in any game, regardless of the sport, when you can feel the momentum shifting without the score actually changing. Sometimes it's a goal-line stand by the defense or a pitcher getting out of a tough jam. The same goes for telecom.

In 2003, just a few weeks before Supercomm, a joint news release from BellSouth, SBC Communications and Verizon announced that the three companies were working together on developing a common way to deploy fiber to the premises. It was a tremendous shot in the arm for an industry that had gone through 24 months of mass layoffs, rejection by Wall Street and the shame of being viewed as a poster child for all that was wrong with corporate America, circa 2000. More important, it was a momentous shift in thinking among the largest industry players. Having won most of the legal battles against CLECs, they turned their attention to a competitor they couldn't regulate away — cable.

A little less than two years later and the “common” approach has more or less gone by the wayside. But throughout the whole process — and even before it began — independent telcos kept chugging away as the sort of undercurrent to the shift. In fact, while the biggest carriers in the industry wrestle with the intricacies of providing voice, high-speed Internet access and video over fiber, independents provide dozens of examples of how to do it right. Like most of the technologies that have slowly swept across the market, independents have been acting as live laboratories.

In this issue of The Independent, we explore the stories of five very different telcos and their reasons for deploying FTTP. In some cases, it's a competitor; in other cases, it's pure community development. But in all cases, they provide living proof that FTTP is real.

Also, be sure to check out the story on Valor Telecom and its unique challenge of serving up massive bandwidth to the press corps covering President George W. Bush when he goes to his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Finally, with trade show season in full swing, be sure to drop me a line at vvittore@primediabusiness.com and let me know what you saw — or didn't see — that impressed you.