They all failed. Fifteen years ago ISDN was the rising technology star of European industry. It is not a red dwarf today but it has not changed the marketplace. These did have a dramatic effect on the market by breaking up the BELL system and defining a regulatory structure which is only now under review. Regulation was the dominant force for change.
Networks are about shared benefit.
Nobody seriously advocates a model where each communicating party buys a cocoa tin and shares the cost of a piece of string to all other parties with whom they wish to communicate if only because it does not scale. It is because Telecommunications is about shared benefit that it is in general regulated and it is the regulatory policy that more than anything else which will define the way the industry looks in the twenty first century. Historically, technology played an important role in shaping the industry. By insisting on very high levels of service availability the industry stayed with electromechanical technology long after computerisation had changed many other aspects of other industries, but this is no longer the case. Telecommunications has embraced digital techniques and the use of software and predictions in the early 1980's about the development of fibre optics and the availability of advanced computer based technology have been quite accurate.