 
Derek_Wildstar
Why the fck is Shane walking in there?
join:2001-02-24
Iscandar
| ...and the beat goes on... Isn't it amazing how the events of the past 18 months have left the once-burgeoning telecom industry a virtual scorched-earth wasteland littered with the charred remains of companies like NorthPoint and Rhythms, and walking-dead like Covad, McLeod and CoreComm? Every day, when I read the Plain Dealer or the WSJ, I see more and more telecom companies dropping by the wayside - and in their wake, some chief executives getting million-dollar bonuses and thousands of disgruntled ex-employees getting hosed. Heck, even though there was some serious accounting monkey-business going on at Enron, a large part of the money problems that led to their Chap. 11 had to do with broadband and fiber optics.
I predict that within the next 5 years, we will start seeing a lot of new legislation enacted to control stuff like this. For example, look at the securities markets. Up until the end of 1933, there was virtually no legislation regulating activities in the securities market. Then, Black Monday (Oct. 29, 1929) hit and the mass dumping of securities in the week that followed nearly destroyed the U.S. economy and helped send us into the Great Depression. As a result, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Maloney Act, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and the Investment Company Act of 1940 - all with the intention of seriously regulating and controlling the securities industry to prevent a debacle like what happened in 1929 from ever happening again.
Even though the financial situation we are in isn't even an inkling of what they were in the early 1930's, I still believe that enough damage has been done to the telecom industry that we will start seeing more serious legislation than the joke that is Tauzin-Dingell. Gird your loins, my friends. Or, better yet, call or write your elected representatives today to tell them how you want to start seeing things.
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I use conjecture and hearsay. Those are kinds of evidence. - Lionel Hutz | |
|  | Network Guy
join:2000-08-25
New York
 ·PHONE POWER
·Broadvox Direct
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| Re: ...and the beat goes on... Yep. It seems to me that with very little or no warning, these companies are suddenly filing for bankruptcy protection, while the execs walk away with bonuses seemingly lucrative for the alleged condition of the company's health. There is no law that I know of that could prevent such thing from happening, and this sort of thing does screw a lot of people over. There is certainly nothing that can prevent this sort of thing from trickling down to the middle class person that gets stuck with the cash crunch of the ever rising inflation, and taxes. I simply can't understand how bankrupt companies manage to have the execs walk away with enough money for early retirement, but nothing for the workers left out in the dark. Yet another reason to have no respect for corporations.
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Posting sig removed by system administrator. Sig cannot exceed 30GB in size. | |
| | 
MoneyBags
@206.98.x.x | ALGX will be one of the only survivors. | |
| 
AkumalDave
Life's A Beach
Premium,MVM
join:2001-04-20
Minneapolis, MN
| From the frying pan into the fire Well, hope our Mcleod voice and data lines do, indeed, stay up (as promised in the article). Have to take issue with the following statement:
quote:
The company, a voice and data carrier that fell victim to the weak economy and growing competition
Where is this growing competition? All I've seen is CLEC after CLEC failing, lessening the amount of competition.
Think it's safe to say this phenomenon won't be repeated, once the shakeout is complete. Gone are the Venture Capitalists with their open wallets. Gone is the Merger and Acquisition fever. Heck, I once had a sales rep brag to me about how his particular CLEC's goal was to get just big enough to get noticed - and then acquired (presumably lining the pockets of the originators). Having suffered through an acquisition, from an end user perspective (Ovation swallowed up by Mcleod), I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Took quite awhile for the dust to settle but, as of now, our Mcleod service is working fine.
As long as our lines stay up, I'm not going to get too agitated about this one (assuming this "prepackaged bankruptcy" does NOT include golden parachutes, that is).
Dave | |
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