Slashdot Mirror
When Telecom Mergers Hit Home
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!"
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....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Spending millions on a new name like Verizon... that will take care of everything.
interesting, i especially liked the par....
NO CARRIER!
If these telco's say it's ok for them to merge because they are no longer the sole provider of such services (i.e. VOIP, Fiber, etc...), then prove them right by jumping to said 3rd party providers.
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
The answer is obvious, they'll outsource the customer support
The title of the article had me thinking of two large companies crashing into my apartment a la the evil white robots from HHGTTG.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
This was more of a rant than an article.
I'm in exactly this kind of situation right now. I'm trying to set up a new DS3 for dialup Internet customers (lol, I know, but there are still a lot of 'em and they pay my salary), and get some numbers ported, and it's a nightmare. Our SBC sales rep of almost ten years isn't allowed to place orders, our new AT&T salesman is a nincompoop, and these processes that would have been trivial this time last year are turning into a trainwreck.
He's just playing the same old game that the rest of us 'customers' have had to play for years.
Essentially, you get referred from one person to the next, until you come upon a situation where facts collides and your potential solution dissappears in a puff of logic.
It's just that now this problem is trickling down (up?) into the business-to-business arena.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
About the cognitive awareness which exists between the leftmost and rightmost appendage of an organism and the unique level to which it doesn't always exist.
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!"
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
What telecom mergers really mean
... at this moment, is they can't!
By Paul McNamara on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 9:08am
AT&T | MCI | SBC | Verizon | Wide Area Networks
As promised in this earlier post, we're all about sharing here at Buzzblog -- specifically, sharing the soapbox. This morning you get to hear from Janet Ley, a reader and telecom manager who has a tale to tell about the impact of mega-mergers. It's amusing, in a maddening sort of way:
By Janet Ley
Those of us who consider ourselves telecommunications "old timers" have seen a lot of change in this industry.
In fact, I always say if you can't deal with change, you are in the wrong business. We've seen the RBOC's taken apart. And recently, with the merger of SBC and AT&T, as well as Verizon and MCI, we are now watching them come back together.
Working with the telco's has always been a challenge. Another of my favorite sayings is "if the telco's did their jobs, my company wouldn't need half of the telecom staff it has." It keeps me in a job, so why am I complaining?
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
This is an example of an actual conversation between myself and my AT&T representatives (now my local representatives) in the last week:
Me:
"I placed an order for a new T1 with an extended D-Marc.
The technician left and didn't extend the circuit.
Can you please send him back to finish the work?"
AT&T:
"We don't do inside wiring."
Me:
"I'm not asking you to do inside wiring, I'm asking you to extend a D-Marc."
AT&T:
"That's inside wiring. We don't do that."
Me:
"I've been ordering circuits with extended D-Marcs for the last 20 years.
How can you tell me you don't do that?"
AT&T:
"All we can do is place the order with the local provider and ask them for an extension.
They don't have to do it, and we can't force them."
Me:
"I placed the order with you.
You ARE my local provider now."
AT&T:
"But I can't order inside wiring for you."
Me: "I'm not ordering inside wiring, I'm ordering an extension of a D-Marc, which you have been doing for us for years."
AT&T:
"We don't do that.
Only the local provider can do that."
Me:
"YOU ARE MY LOCAL PROVIDER.
You won't let me call my old account rep to place the order, so who do I talk to, to order an extended D-Marc?"
AT&T:
"I don't know.
FCC regulations prohibit me from ordering inside wiring."
Me:
was "We dont have to do shit for you now."
which wouldnt surprise me if that were the case.
The great thing about merging two incompetent companies is they usually collapse faster and make room for someone who can do what the customer wants.
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. The losers generally get bought out and absorbed by the winners. The break up created a number of artificial players in the industry which have since sucumbed to market pressures/bad management/changing industry resulting in the consolidation of the industry. The big problem is that technology is changing so quickly that the old mega corporations can not change quickly enough. This was evident with AT&T which stumbled around on inertia for many many years, sheding parts of the company to prop up the old paradigm for doing business until there was nothing else to shed. That was when SBC saw its chance to acquire the parent company at a price the accounts thought was a good deal. It will be interesting to see what parts of the old AT&T are canabalized for use and which parts will be discarded. Based on past experience neither organization really knows what it is doing. All they seem to do anymore is try to make the numbers for the next quarter so the stock holders and pundits are pleased so the stock price goes up. Which is the real problem with the entire industry, they are not able to look much further than 3 months down the road to the next analyst meeting. With most projects taking more than 3 months to implement and reap any rewards very few get a chance to be completed. They get cut, or the people get cut, before some of the more inovative ideas have a chance to make money.
We don't care.
We don't have to.
We're the Phone Company.
Now all we need is Lilly Tomlin to take those orders and we're all set!
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Mergers usually happen before everyone knows all the facts. Rather than being good for the customers and saying, "Do stuff as usual until we come up with new rules.." its "Don't do anything until we come up with new rules.."
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.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
End result was once the rt was finished, we went to a local mom and pop provider. My company lost many days worth of email and our web presence to this monstrosity. Mom and pop shop can at least save our email, SBC wont even touch that.
Now SBC is part of AT&T, shudder, I've already had to call tech support, they still own the lines, and got shuffled between both companies. Literally, one said to call another, and vice versa. It's damn hard not to scream when they give me the number I just called.
This monopoly crap, needs to go.
Marvin isn't Evil, he's just missunderstood.
Regards, Phil
Does anyone else see a wierd yellow line running vertically through the page?
If I had to guess, I'd say that it meant they'd fallen and can't get up.
(This is a throwback to the annoying corporate speak article from a yesterday. Not only does the phrase "on the ground" add nothing to most of the sentences in which it appears, but it's easy to make a case that the phrase was popularized by uber-asshole Donald Rumsfeld. That's a double whammy right there.)
Nortel Networks bought Alteon WebSystems, Inc. for $7.8 billion dollars in 2000, just to scrap it a couple of years later after realizing that it couldn't easily be merged with the existing Nortel product lines. Perhaps they should have investigated it a little bit better before deciding to spend the money in the warchest. This is just one of the bad mergers Nortel did under the leadership of John Roth (no, he didn't just do bad stuff, but merging companies wasn't his - or the board's - cup of tea).
The Presidents Analyst~ http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/p/president s-analyst.shtml
"And what might this meeting in the middle, this muddling of nation states into a blend of capitalist and authoritarian ideologies, look like? The movie's climax gives us more than a clue when Sidney's path is diverted one last time, into the secretive corporate headquarters of TPC -- "The Phone Company," a knockoff of Bell Telephone, which was in 1967 a tremendous and unpopular monopoly. Spirited away to the star chamber at the center of TPC, Sidney is briefed, James Bond-villain style, on the future of the human race by TPC president Arlington Hewes (Pat Harrington), aided by an animated film that sends up the brilliant propaganda cartoons Frank Capra and others made for Bell Labs throughout the 1950s and '60s. Only this ain't Our Mr. Sun. The company's scheme, Hewes explains, is to make communication more convenient by embedding electrical chips called "cerebrum communicators" -- which are rendered in the cartoon as adorable, big-eyed sprites -- straight into its customers' brains, thereby eliminating the need for expensive cable lines and infrastructure. In effect, TPC hopes to turn its customers into nodes of its communications network. "Congress will have to pass a law substituting personal numbers for names," Hewes explains placidly, "as the only legal means of identification." This technological nightmare fuses free-market corporatism gone amuck with the regimentation and loss of individuality that characterized the Soviet empire -- a meeting in the middle."
Sig Hansen?
Having a T1 moved Post SBC purchase.
From the 4th floor to the 3rd floor.
Took 36 days and 8 people to move 1 T1 Line 1 floor.
It's fucking ridiculous.
I would hate to see what would happen after the bellsouth acquisition.
The article makes it clear that the telcos are refusing to take orders from paying customers.
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?
A municipal wireless buildout would torpedo the natural monopoly, which is proobably why the phone companies are so desperate to stop those porjects.
Seems that when we relocated our office and put lines into their appropriate hunt groups all sorts of weirdness followed.
Verizon has issued dozens of tickets for the same problems, yet mysteriously the tickets close and the problems aren't fixed.
The problem I'm talking about could EASILY be remedied at the switch level. The main problem is that a few lines had call forward on busy/no answer on them. Do you think our Verizon rep could have told us that? Hell no. Do you think they'd be responsive? Hell no. What was our solution? Read on.
We disconnected the lines and ordered new ones. Of course Verizon was happy because now they got to pocket a number change fee. We're not happy because not only did we have to pay for their incompetence, we had to waste a whole lot of time doing so.
I too remember the monopoly days when Bell tried to stymie every bit of innovation that didn't meet their revenue needs. But then, I was paying $12.00 a month for unlimited local service, and that included leasing a 2500 set. Now I pay $28.98 a month (The damned fees are creeping into VoIP now!) for unlimited local/ld throughout North America, and a raft of features that Verizon would have charged me $80 or so a month for. But then I get zero support.
So since the breakup I pay a little more, get more features, but no service. Nice.
The really awful thing about government supported monopoly is that they never go away and you can never compete with them no matter how incompetent they may be. If these idiots have their way, you will once again be renting your phone and begging permission to hook up a modem.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not Marvin.
He meant "LTUAE".
There's no practical competition to land lines only because landlines are no longer practical. Cell phone networks are both cheaper and more reliable. Freeing broadcast spectum would solve all of these problems. Eliminating the monopoly on wire laying is a also a very practical solution. If there's really no money in it, people won't do it. If they do it, there's more choice for everyone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
would you put a link in your .sig that you can't get to without an account? Dimwit.
Because what was bad is now impossible.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I read this and assumed they were naturally talking about the AT&T Wireless + Cingular merger...
They hate that. But it gets results.
Especially when you say "This call is being recorded for quality control purposes".
welcome our new AT&T overlords.....
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
The ones regarding computer voice? With Robbie the Robot? And Kit, David Hasselhoff's talking car from Knight Rider?
Anyway, the ad talks about the "wonderful" history of AT&T's inventiveness, implying all the breakthroughs in computers that Bell Labs achieved over the years, along with those Nobel prizes.
Um, did anyone but me notice: Neither SBC or AT&T can lay claim to the old Bell Labs' innovations. Bell Labs went with the old Western Electric when AT&T sold off what became Lucent Technologies. Lucent's corporate slogan is even "Bell Labs Innovations". I guess SBC/AT&T needs to wrap up the ad campaign quick before Alcatel, the French telecom giant buying Lucent, sends out the lawyers.
I thought Microsoft and SCO were the only tech companies allowed to re-write history?
...to get more people to pay for a three-way calling service.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
They're about removing 'unnecessary' competition and price pressure. Thanks to the mass corporate adoption of Jack Welch's 'I'm either #1, #2 or I'm out of a market' philosophy and application of the 'Beautiful Mind' guy's girl-selection theory to customers, we're going to end up with a world where every product you can think of -- everything -- will be Coke vs Pepsi vs Dr. Pepper and absolutely nobody else. You'll have a mind-numbing array of of logos, pretty boxes and commercial spokes-androids to pledge allegiance to, though.
It looks like a good time to revisit the idea of the CLEC.
.... sorry, we messed up the old one....
However, there are examples where deregulation is not necessarily beneficial to all. Here in Georgia, sales of Natural Gas has been deregulated. However, in my opininon, it's a total CF for Joe Consumer. There still exists a centralized organization that provides the gas, but different companies (AKA Gas Marketers) "sell" the gas. There is a monthly "pass-through" to the centralized gas company to the tune of $17-35 just for the priveledge of having Natural Gas, plus a "Customer Service Charge" of $6.00. So, back in October, when I used 2.1 Therms (210 cubic feet of gas), the charge for the gas itself was $2.31, but the total bill was $28.77. Before deregulation, my bill might have come to about $5.00. It may be beneficial to those who use a lot of gas (i.e. businesses) but Joe Consumer gets screwed!
This whole section of comments is one giant off-topic. The topic is not about how the baby bells reforming as an entity much larger than they ever were before, yet how this business practice creates massive process problems within already mismanaged companies.
I have worked in telecom from every aspect for some time, so I have an intimate understanding of how bad this can be. I'm fortunate that my company has managed to take the correct approach of process and engineering system merging. We are in the minority though. I won't go naming companies, but most of the big ones have 10+ engineering systems. The processes are non-existant between the different regions. It's not even a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it's more like each finger doesn't know what the one next to it is doing. This problem is only going to get worse as more and more of them merge. For joe citizen, it won't mean much, but for companies it's a huge problem. The time to turn up service continues to rise at the mega bells, and there is no sign of that changing.
Verizon in particular is not mixing core with Verizon Business. The only interconnects we're doing are Verizon Business to Verizon GNS (their legacy LD network, primarily for carrying Verizon Wireless LD trunks I believe). I think there's some exaggeration to the confusion. One side is regulated heavily, the other mostly deregulated. Union vs. non-union, etc. There are just too many differences for core to be integrated heavily with Business, or Wireless, or GNS.
What the mergers mean on the ground is not limited to quality of service or customer support. The real danger here is a drastic eventual increase in the price of service. Without competition monopolies will rise prices and customers will have no choice but to pay. Governments may eventually lose their control of the monopolies. It is concievable that cyclicly merging and splitting telcoms every few decades will help to keep the industry healthy in the long run. I just hope that this cycle trend will continue carefully because an overly stretched cycle will overbenefit telcoms and make losers out of consumers.
...is that the old original AT&T offered far better service than what you get now from the crap phone companies. Sure, you may have paid a bit more than you did after the breakup...but the service was worth it.
and I REALLY hate it when they merge
It sometimes used to take a month or more to get a telephone connected in an apartment. That was especially true in college towns at the start of the fall semester.
And one time we needed a dialup line for a PDP-11/70. It took several months before I found someone at the telephone company who could tell me what they required before they could hook up the line -- the ringer equivalence for the telephone modem.
yes, western union's primary business is moving money out of the US, courtesy of illegal alien invaders and their plutocratic employers. What a fine upstanding "US" company.
Why is it that users who paste the contents of the article get modded ++ ?? I'll start copy-pasting myself, might turn my karma around :-/
from http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/course .cfm?Program=MA
It's "regulated" (I use the term extremely loosely) by a government that has a very hefty financial stake in the same company.
It costs roughly 2000% more to surf the internet at bottom-of-the-range ADSL (1Mbps is as fast as we can go) speeds than it does in the US of A, and UK. Oh, and lest I forget, the bandwidth usage is capped at 3GB (tho you can buy an extra gig at USD25 if you really need it). That's if they can even provide the ADSL service in your area.
Check out http://www.hellkom.co.za/ to see what other joyful benefits this company provides for the people who paid for its infrastructure with their tax bucks.
So, every time I hear an someone in the first world countries whining about the high costs of their (essentially unlimited) internet access I have a manic little giggle, and recount the days before I can emigrate from this shit tip of a country.
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
Well... the local telcos (until recently, VERY recently) are indeed a monolopy with anti-competitive practices. But they are actually in their positions BECAUSE of the government!
So therefore they are a government granted monolopy! Water, utilitiy (power), sewer, phone, and cable are all local monolopies in place because of the government.
Long-distance telephone service is no longer monolopolized nor regulated. Local service is. When the government gets involved, prices go up, and it's usually bad for consumers.
Libertas in infinitum
Technology changes things. Technology can take a utility that has been given a governmental granted monolopy and make it so that a natural monolopy won't occour.
For example, phone service. One used to only be able to get a 'dial tone' by having a local telco run a wire to the house. Now we can choose between that, a cell phone, or VoIP. Now local telcos do not have the same stranglehold that they used to because of technology. The gov should drop regulation on it.
In the future think about things such as electricty. Perhaps we can microwave energy from a sat to any house that wants it. Since we can have an unlimited number of sats, that means we could have a CHOICE of power companies.
What about a personal home fusion reactor? Or what about a process that takes refuse and turns it into distilled water (this already exists BTW)? Or a home water recycling unit? Any of these advances in technology would ELIMINATE the need for governmental regulated monolopies of natural monolopies.
Roads? When we get fail-safe automation, and the ability to make flying vehicles affordable, the state won't be forced to build/maintain as many roads.
So honestly, I think that almost all monolopies will go away if we have free markets, limited government, and capital invested in R&D.
Libertas in infinitum
I think a distinction should be made between local telcos and long-distance carriers.
Local telcos until very recently (think Vonage and VoIP), have a geographic municipality-granted monolopy. If you want a dial tone, you had to have a a local telco provide one at their rates up until about 10-15 years ago.
Now for a local dial tone you can go with a telco, a cell-co, or VoIP.
Long distance was deregulated years ago and now long distance is virtually $free/minute as a result. Technology has helped with the local governental granted monolopies, but I think deregulation should be conducted there as well.
Libertas in infinitum