Building the Future-Proof Telco

by David Diamond | Wired Magazine | Issue 6.05 | May 1998

"Qwest will soon have more capacity than AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and WorldCom put together. And none of them saw the upstart coming."

"As ambitious projects go, this one conjures images of the laying of the railroads, the 19th-century phenomenon that catapulted the United States from the slowpoke days of horses and sailing ships and canal barges into the Industrial Age. But Joseph Nacchio, CEO of Qwest Communications International, which is hurriedly sinking 16,285 route miles of fiber-optic cable into American soil in an effort to truly catapult the nation into the Information Age, prefers another historical metaphor."

""Let's say it's 1859. I come out of the hills of Pennsylvania. I tell you, 'Hey, guess what I just found? I've got this new source of energy. It's oil. And it's going to dramatically lower the cost of energy.' You look at me kind of cockeyed and say, 'Hey, what are you crazy? The coal guys - they've got the railroads, they've got the distribution, they've got the customers.' The last thing I can say to you is, 'Heck, don't worry about it. See all those horses out there crapping in the street? Sixty years from now there's going to be something called automobiles that will burn this stuff and 80 years from now these guys in Delaware will use it to make something called plastics.'"

"OK, so the folks who discovered oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, couldn't see that clearly into the future. But they did have a vision: They knew that in an energy-based economy, if you could change the price performance of energy, something big was bound to happen. Likewise, Nacchio predicts, "if we can change the price performance of bandwidth and long distance, if we can collapse distance and time, something big is going to happen. We're not going to be the guys that are going to design it," he continues, "it's going to be all the complementary industries. It's going to be like an organic system. There are other folks that contribute to the ecology. We just take the one key element of the system - bandwidth - and push it dramatically.""

read the rest of this excellent 7 page article at the link below :

Wired 6.05 : Building the Future-Proof Telco