Summary
1. What’s next – bringing back the telegraph on a limited basis for high-income people to commemorate the past? 2. It seems like a major drop in corporate expectations -- for what was a once a major force in the telecom industry -- to get involved with voice trading in the US. 3. One may even take it a step further in that it smacks of extreme desperation.
Analysis
Unless we are missing something, a major league telecom service provider in the US would not normally be attracted to establishing a minutes trading desk. While the two other RBOCs have much grander ambitions, Qwest Communications is essentially hyping something that could never be central to its overall strategy. It is clearly a side business – making money off the hedge.
At least in the recent past, bandwidth trading has had kind of a negative connation to it in the US. Enron used to be a big proponent of the business.
Internationally, this notion of making voice minutes into a commodity goes back over 20 years. And bandwidth trading in some form has evidently been around for decades. But, again, getting into this commodity business is not something that would be of much interest to a well-established carrier in the States.
