Michael Capellas, MCI's president and CEO, expects consolidation within the U.S. carrier market isn't over despite the recent deals between MCI-Verizon, SBC-AT&T and Nextel-Sprint. Calling it a "natural evolution" and a "natural end game", Capellas said he expects more to come. One of the driving factors, he said, is demand from customers for the vertical integration of services - a.k.a. in the residential market as bundles and in the corporate market as one-stop shopping. As for the deal with Verizon, Capellas, who gave a speech at the Canadian Telecom Summit, said it's always an easier process when a large company buys a small company. When asked what lessons he learned from the Compaq-HP deal, he offered three pieces of advice: keep your account teams in place, move quickly and have good integration plans in place.

Darren Entwistle, Telus' CEO, made no bones about the CRTC's recent decision to regulate ILECs that offer Internet telephony service. Calling the decision "disappointing" he questioned the regulator's belief it needs to protect cablecos from ILECs given they have well-established infrastructures and brands, as well as millions of customers. "Are the cable operators really the Davids who need regulatory protection from the telco giants? The answer is no," he said during a keynote speech at the Canadian Telecom Summit. Perhaps the line of the conference was Entwistle's contention the cablecos are deserving of a "theatrical award" for their work in positioning themselves as the underdog.
After thinking about the CRTC decision since it came out May 12, the major flaw is that the cablecos don't need a window opportunity to establish a foothold in the telephony market. It's not like they're start-ups trying to establish a foothold in the market while spending large amounts of money to build their own networks and organizations. If the CRTC had decided to not regulate the Internet telephony market, do you think Rogers Communications would have pulled or scaled back its plan to get into the telephony business?

I had an interesting chat with Carlos Dominguez, Cisco's senior vice-president of worldwide service provider operations. As much as carriers are focused on cutting costs by converging data and voice traffic on to the same networks, Dominquez said it's also important for them to have the right tools to monitor and manage network activity. This technology lets carriers better allocate capacity and create new value-added services, as well as avoid building out unneeded capacity. At the heart of Cisco's network management portfolio are deep packet inspection and IP traffic predictability technology. Dominguez, who spoke earlier today at the Canadian Telecom Summit, talked about a cable customer who was having problems with service to 1,000 customers. Using packet inspection boxes, Cisco discovered there 27 customers running ISPs. During an analyst call earlier today, Nortel CEO Bill Owens talked about Nortel can combine its deep packet inspection technology with Symantec Corp.'s virus and intrusion expertise to secure networks.

Traffic on this blog in May surpassed 50,000 unique visitors - 56,134 to be exact - for the first time. It's amazing so many people are checking it out. What started as a "science experiment" has taken on a strange and wonderful life of its own. I'm open to any suggestions on how to improve the look/feel, content, etc.

You wonder if Nortel has become the "Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight" when it comes to investor relations. On Monday, the company issued a press release regarding a conference call with analysts this morning about its first-quarter results. When Nortel was asked when the results would actually be released - after the markets closed Tuesday or pre-markets Wednesday - no information about timing was offered. You can imagine how many people were surprised yesterday afternoon when Nortel's 10-Q was issued by the SEC at 5:15 p.m. All Nortel had to tell analysts and the media yesterday was the 10-Q would be filed with the SEC at some point Tuesday so there was a possibility it would come out after markets.
As for the first-quarter results, Nortel lost US$49-million, or 1 cent a share, compared with a profit of US$59-million last year. Revenue rose 4% to US$2.54-billion. The company said that, for the remainder of 2005, it expects "continued growth in revenues compared to 2004."