Prospects are dim for a full fledged recovery for telecom as long as the best effort paradigm remains as the only way of doing business.

The Internet became a capital repellant best-network paradox because it was assumed by the implementers that a best effort network would be good enough as a foundation on which to build the new digital foundations of telecom.

They were wrong.

There is little incentive to over-provision anything except to preserve one's market share. But preserving market share requires pouring more money in than one gets back. Eventually, the carrier runs out of money and declares bankruptcy.

The Internet peering model is fundamentally broken.

A key future question may well be whether the center can ever deliver a value proposition to the edge.