One of the real dangers of living through the 1990s in telecom is that it can be very hard to get excited about anything.

For example, last week Verizon announced that it has built a fiber optic network all the way to 30,000 homes in Keller, Texas, and that it will spend $2 billion this year to reach a total of 1 million homes in nine states.
Pretty heady stuff for the staid old telecom industry, right?

Well, sure (yawn) assuming you don’t remember the last time that Verizon was building fiber to its customers’ homes. Let’s see, that was Paul’s Pond, no Charlie’s Creek, no wait, Tom’s River! That’s right, a cute little berg in New Jersey.

And then there was the plan to deliver video over asymmetric DSL that was tested in Virginia and (very briefly) a flirtation with wireless cable. Let’s not even get into the content production/acquisition consortium that Bell Atlantic and GTE were a part of, pre-merger.

But wait, that’s not the only example. This week, Lucent bought Telica, a softswitch company, for $295 million, promising that this acquisition is the key to more quickly delivering the next generation of IP services to businesses and consumers.

Now it’s much too easy for even the non-cynical to poke fun at Lucent for buying a start-up company for some hot technology that Lucent itself has allegedly been developing for several years. Such acquisitions were more frequent in the late 1990s than repossessed BMWs in Silicon Valley after the bubble burst.

Consider this, however: Lucent’s goal in this acquisition is to catch up to rival Nortel in the VoIP equipment market and then create such advanced services as integrated messaging, wireless-wireline integration through follow-me services, and integrated data and video services that make it unnecessary to leave the sofa for anything other than bladder relief.
 
The trouble is anyone who lived through the ‘90s must remember that integrated messaging was a line on a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation (they didn’t own PowerPoint back then) in 1995, when the evil giant of software domination was trying to lure telephone companies onto its bandwagon. Follow-me is a version of the original goal of personal communications services, before that term was co-opted by Johnny-come-latelys in the wireless world.