Most Carriers are trapped. They are faced with equally unpalatable choices: "lose-if-you-win" and "lose-if-you-lose."

Anyone looking to understand the economic future of the telecom industry must begin to look at global as well as regional assumptions about culture, technology policy and economics.

Over the last three decades, Western technologists have designed vast, complex greenfield systems like the Public Internet. For a while they built and people came. As Moore's Law turned their products into commodities, they found themselves too top heavy to compete.

The IT and telecom companies of Europe and North America are locked in to a complex systems concept frame of mind from which they are unlikely to escape.

In reviewing both the marketing and profit and loss lessons of the last quarter of the last century, from automobiles to fine china to radio to agriculture, we find that the adoption of "one size fits all" economies of scale lead irreversibly to "production cost below sales price" commodities that either require governmental subsidies or an entire re-thinking of the system's goals.