And while that competition may change the dynamics of the telecommunications industry, the first step, analysts say, is to assure that portability works.
In 1998 when AT&T acquired TeleCommunications Inc., the first thing Case did was head to Washington to lobby for open-access regulation that would force cable operators to let ISPs like AOL use their lines to deliver Internet service.
So said a voice on the fuzzy line as it searched for a telecommunications path during the first 15 or 20 attempts to reach the Hotel Nacional de Cuba on Friday evening.
The new Congress overhauled telecommunications laws for the first time in decades, allowing media companies like Mr. Murdoch's to expand by increasing the share of the national audience they could reach.
In the fourth quarter alone, Telecom Italia, British Telecommunications and France Telecom are trying to raise as much as $25 billion in debt, or three-quarters the amount issued by all telecommunications companies through the first nine months of the year, according to ING Barings.
Huawei Technologies, a provider of telecommunications solutions, adopted the first approach.
She describes walking into the Silicon Valley office of a global telecommunications firm, where the first person she saw was a French engineer.
This was the hallmark of the telecommunications industry in the first part of 2000.
And it took more than five years to produce the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which itself was the first major overhaul of telecommunications law since the Communications Act of 1934.
Shanghai Bell, formed in 1983, was one of the first telecommunications joint ventures in China.
