Essential Guide to Telecommunications, The, Third Edition

Summary

Entrepreneurs, spurred by perceived opportunities for new networks, developed many of the optical and switching innovations previously discussed. They envisioned that competition would provide opportunities to sell equipment to new carriers. However, in most of Europe and in the United States, competitive network providers underestimated the difficulty of competing with incumbents and the expense of building new infrastructure. Moreover, competitors have been hurt by regulators' failure to uniformly enforce low-priced, timely interconnections to incumbent networks. In addition, new carriers have incurred huge loses and large amounts of debt as a result of the high costs of building out their networks. In the short run, capital investment ...