Halloween is typically a scary time filled with little ghosts and goblins roaming the streets... your neighbor's kid egging your house because he thinks club-store candy corn is lame ... your teenage daughter trying to sneak out of your house in a "slutty witch/vampire/nurse/etc." costume ... your 9-year-old son going to bed with Dots candy stuck to $3,000 worth of recently installed orthodontics. But it's a really scary time in the wireline and wireless businesses, too.
For example, after careful analysis, the FCC decided to delay its decision on whether to grant AT&T a rate increase for special access services last December. Meanwhile, if the pending merger between Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) moves forward, ILECs will face a more powerful competitive in the Ethernet services market. Even before that megadeal is complete, Comcast continues to enhance its Ethernet holdings in Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) New York territory.
In FierceTelecom's latest feature, editor Sean Buckley explores some of the near-term pain that service providers and vendors have been faced with over the past year. You can read about those wireline nightmares right here. And you can take a look at what keeps wireless executives up at night over here.