I came to that sector a while later in the mid-2ks, during the post bubble cleanup and in time for the Dawn of Mobile Internet!!
The depressing thing really was that the Eurotelcos borrowed all the money and used it to build empires, not networks. They put an enormous amount of effort into avoiding building out FTTH as far as possible, treated all things Internet as a weird American perversion as late as they possibly could, but boy howdy they stuck some flags in maps and threw money at TV people.
TEF was perhaps the most ridiculous; I vividly remember going to their comically enormous postmodernist-Alhambra fusion HQ in the great Spanish bugger-all and looking at the gallery of founding father portraits while the company was ~€80bn in debt and putting a giant neon blue lightbulb in its London office to be more Digital. The portraits reminded me a bit of this Goya: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/47183
On the other hand, Level(3) or should I say...AS3356...is still a top name for Internet backbone today everywhere in the world even if it is a Centurylink division these days.
Later on, of course, Verizon and T-Mo USA discovered the joy of pure Internet while AT&T got hooked on the telco-as-media crack and Sprint did...whatever the hell Dan Hesse was up to while he was the best paid CEO in the business while the company fell apart.
One of these days I'll tell you about the mobile web page load time simulator I made in an Excel spreadsheet that said the best carriers in Europe were the French ones.
Unless you do exactly as I want.
(Try using your phone on the Paris Metro, it will knock your bollocks off.)
It is, of course, worth figuring out how the current AI mania maps onto this. Part of it (data centers) looks like the telecom bubble. Other parts of it (coding assistants) looks like the dot com bubble.
Thanks. Super interesting. Yeah the speed of innovation cycles and horizontal/number of use cases is difference albeit you wonder who the winners will be.
I came to that sector a while later in the mid-2ks, during the post bubble cleanup and in time for the Dawn of Mobile Internet!!
The depressing thing really was that the Eurotelcos borrowed all the money and used it to build empires, not networks. They put an enormous amount of effort into avoiding building out FTTH as far as possible, treated all things Internet as a weird American perversion as late as they possibly could, but boy howdy they stuck some flags in maps and threw money at TV people.
TEF was perhaps the most ridiculous; I vividly remember going to their comically enormous postmodernist-Alhambra fusion HQ in the great Spanish bugger-all and looking at the gallery of founding father portraits while the company was ~€80bn in debt and putting a giant neon blue lightbulb in its London office to be more Digital. The portraits reminded me a bit of this Goya: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/47183
On the other hand, Level(3) or should I say...AS3356...is still a top name for Internet backbone today everywhere in the world even if it is a Centurylink division these days.
Later on, of course, Verizon and T-Mo USA discovered the joy of pure Internet while AT&T got hooked on the telco-as-media crack and Sprint did...whatever the hell Dan Hesse was up to while he was the best paid CEO in the business while the company fell apart.
Thanks for sharing. Super interesting
One of these days I'll tell you about the mobile web page load time simulator I made in an Excel spreadsheet that said the best carriers in Europe were the French ones.
Unless you do exactly as I want.
(Try using your phone on the Paris Metro, it will knock your bollocks off.)
Scott Mead the Goldman partner that made tens of millions from advising Vodafone has become quite a good photographer!
At least it's not a restaurant with rooms:-)
Top summary.
But with Ai, ‘This time it’s different’ 🤣
It's always different until it isn't..haha
It is, of course, worth figuring out how the current AI mania maps onto this. Part of it (data centers) looks like the telecom bubble. Other parts of it (coding assistants) looks like the dot com bubble.
ETA: I ran your essay through o1 pro and asked it to compare the present AI bubble to these two older bubbles; results are here: https://chatgpt.com/share/67d0284e-3cc4-8002-bdc0-b32cb76ce3a3
Thanks. Super interesting. Yeah the speed of innovation cycles and horizontal/number of use cases is difference albeit you wonder who the winners will be.