Opening up our markets would actually be a grand idea, and a big piece of that is, are we going to have enough spectrum available. I hope that U.S. companies as well as foreign entrants will be able to come in and deploy some of the services that we are now seeing in Scandinavia and Japan. It would also be good if we could leap beyond the collection of standards we have right now, so that the industry can coalesce around a set of standards for the next generation. But I don' t see signs of that happening. Another major issue that confronts telecom companies is the future of Internet telephony.
Internet telephony is an interesting play.
It is, for both technical and regulatory reasons, a way to avoid regulation that has traditionally been imposed on voice telecommunications, both local and long-distance. It is at present not a very good substitute for traditional telecommunications. But its quality is poor because of the nature of transmission over the IP, or Internet Protocol, network. It makes it very good for shipping Web pages back and forth, but not very effective for conversations or interactive video. So you get free telephone service if you have voice over IP, but it's not a very good telephone service.