Where Are They Now?

In this era of slumping stocks and other woes, the telecom industry is in sore need of its best and brightest. The staff of Telecom Business wondered what happened to some former industry leaders; with the help of our contacts at the CIA, we’ve managed to track down some folks and where they’ve resurfaced:

• Reed E. Hundt

  , former chairman of the FCC, is on the board of several companies and runs a McKinsey and Company consulting firm. He wrote a book called You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics, which details the political maneuvering behind the enormous creation of wealth and social changes that have been dubbed the “new economy.” He has his own Web site: www.reedhundt.com.

• Richard Notebaert

  , who supposedly “retired” as president and CEO of Ameritech after the company merged with SBC, is now the CEO of Tellabs, a provider of voice and data transport access systems.

• Kirby “Buddy” Pickle

  , former president and CEO of Teligent, is currently serving as the CEO of PF.net, a facilities-based provider of fiber-optic communications infrastructure to carriers, Internet service providers (ISPs), enterprise customers and government entities.

• Hossein Eslambolchi

  , former senior vice president of packet and optical network services at AT&T, joined Cisco as senior vice president of service provider solutions.

• Sol Trujillo

  , former chairman, president and CEO of US West, is replacing the founder of Gravitron, a CIA-funded wireless networks company.

Glamorous endings? Perhaps not, but it just goes to show that old telecom executives never die, they just move to greener pastures.