The new RBOCs: It's all about pantyhose

By Daniel Briere and Christine Heckart
Network World, 06/07/99

Well, we think it's time to officially call a timeout in all this merger mania. We're not getting the widespread innovation promised by the telecom act or the competition promised by all the new technology. Instead, the focus is on which products to merge, which ones to cancel and which employees to fire/keep/move.

We've been hit hard on this lately at TeleChoice because we have not been able to get the basics from our carriers. We cannot get ISDN or digital subscriber line (DSL) at our Denver office, despite the fact both are advertised heavily in the area. We cannot get any form of high-speed Internet access at our Connecticut offices where the new SBC Communications/Southern New England Telephone (SNET) combination is supposed to reign king. We figure SBC is too busy gobbling up other regional Bell operating companies.

You'd think the rollup of RBOCs into SBC would be a good thing, trimming costs and letting more money go to innovation. We just have to give it time, right? No. In fact, the conservatism of SBC is being felt across the SBC extended family, where all sorts of projects are seemingly on hold while employees wait to find what's going to happen when this or that merger is complete.

SBC claims to be data-savvy, but there is no innovation - just repackaged 2-year-old thinking. This is the company that talks about how much it is investing in opening its markets, while behind the scenes the carrier spends considerable resources making it difficult for new competitors to enter its markets.

And what we do hear about major initiatives within SBC does not really thrill us. We have many friends at Ameritech. The big news there? No, it's not a brand-new strategy, new products or even new management. No, it's that people can't dress casually anymore because SBC has a pantyhose and blue-suit approach (preferably not on the same person).

And then there's Bell Atlantic and GTE. That merger is still crawling. What's on everyone's minds at GTE? Thank goodness the shareholder vote passed because everyone can execute their options.

So what would we like to see? Simple: Stop all this expansion, and just give us what you are announcing. When SBC launched its Online Office - a single pack of e-mail, high-speed Internet, Web hosting, remote access and desktop support - we said, "Hey, neat." Of course, now we have to move to San Francisco, Los Angeles or Austin, Texas. You see, it's not being rolled out everywhere in SBC territory until later this year, and even then it's tied to DSL access availability. Oh no, here we go again.

You know, everyone complains about the Microsoft monopoly, but secretly, we all love that monopoly because we can count on a certain degree of uniformity across our applications and interfaces. RBOCs need to get away from their focus on out-of-region expansion, stock prices and merger mania, and start improving services in their own territories.