Lucent Technologies, the phone equipment maker that became a symbol of last decade's boom-and-bust cycle in telecommunications, is in negotiations to be acquired by Alcatel of France for about $12.6 billion, people close to the discussions said late Thursday.
Riding alongside these cycles, wireless telecommunications evolved similarly over the years before converging with tech in the form of the mobile web.
Kirk Dailey, corporate vice president of intellectual property at Motorola Mobility, said, "Motorola has innovated and patented throughout every cycle of the telecommunications industry evolution, from Motorola's invention of the cell phone to its development of premier smartphone products.
A couple of decades before the boom-bust cycle in e-commerce and telecommunications there was a similar phenomenon in artificial intelligence.
"But we're on the verge of a new personal computer cycle with Windows 2000, along with accelerating growth in telecommunications, capacity constraints among semiconductor and other component vendors and strong demand in the Asian markets".
Nevertheless, telecommunications companies live to some extent outside the regular business cycle.
This is the case because light waves oscillate at enormously high frequencies (about 2 × 1014 cycles per second for the infrared light generally used for fibre-optic telecommunications).
Some telecommunications companies are developing platforms that capitalize on their life-cycle management capabilities.
"The telecommunications field is very dynamic, it's not simply about calling a cycle, theres a lot more to it," Hodulik notes.
By stripping away consumer and investor protections, the deregulation of the telecommunications and electric industries in the late 1990's unleashed a boom-and-bust cycle that has had grave consequences for both sectors and the economy.
