Moment of truth for the Baby Bells?The Wall Street Journal reports that credit rating agency, Standard & Poor’s is contemplating cutting the credit rating of the baby bells within a week or so. Such a move would be the first time the ratings firm has acted against these three companies at once, WSJ says. If its one step downgrade, then things will be all right, but if the cut is steeper than that, the bonds would tumble, and stocks would follow. And even the healthy dividends might go out of the window. I see this as proof of the continuing telecom death spiral.
The traditional telecom world is bleeding profusely, and VoIP is the anti-coagulant.
In my blog (http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/) I blogged about the death of telecom companies, but also blogged about the death of some VoIP players, i.e. Vonage, Net2phone, etc. here: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/archives/the-fall-of-vonage-and-net2phone.asp
The next 10 years will be very interesting to see who survives and who doesn’t.