Spectrum of Greed

Qwest, Sprint, AT&T & Verizon made the cut - Not!

Face it, you don’t have any choice when it comes to wired or wireless connectivity.  There are only a few providers, and they march in lockstep.  Well, maybe a bunch of thugs doing a synchronized high kick would be more accurate.  CIO Insight’s November 2008 survey reports that telecom vendors got the worst reviews of any service provider group this year.  The highest of the lot, Sprint Nextel, scored 65%, with Verizon Communications scraping the bottom of the barrel at a 49% overall satisfaction rating.  Compare this to the top vendor, RSA security, who scored 82%.  Now consider this dichotomy:  If you look at the highest ranked vendors (click on link above), two smart phone providers achieved the highest ratings, while the network companies they run on ranked the lowest.  This doesn’t bode well for a country that wants to advance their connectivity compared to the rest of the world.

As Ziff Davis Enterprise Editorial Research puts it, “Telecommunications firms typically rank far below their counterparts in hardware, software, networking and security.”  Duh.  Wow, how could that be?  I mean, with the FCC doing the fantastic job they do to make sure we have the perfect marketplace, I can’t imagine why these scores aren’t higher.  But don’t worry, where my imagination fails, the spin doctors in the industry have been hired specifically with a focus on possessing full blown, hallucinogenic quality imaginations that are perfectly suited to making the press releases for the media to blast all over about the incredible job being done in telecom land.  That Verizon guy and his groupy entourage gets me pumped every time I see him.

As Edward Demming said many years ago (I paraphrase), in most cases where things are not working the way they are supposed to, it isn’t because of bad or malicious people doing things wrong - it is because good people are working in a bad system.  Guess what?  That applies to telecom just as much as it does to manufacturing or any other industry.  What we have here folks is a bad system.  And just as you have to do any time you want to fix a bad system, you don’t worry about replacing the workers or the equipment - you have to change or replace the leadership.  And in the case of leadership for telecom, the finger points straight at the FCC.