Corvis said quarterly sales declined 94 percent, to a meager $1.4 million, as the fiber-optics maker promised to cut expenses and wait out the telecommunications slump.

Lucent announced plans to cut an additional 10,000 jobs and forecast a larger-than-expected quarterly loss, signaling that its problems are far from over.

Down to 35,000 employees, from 123,000 two years ago. Taking a $4B charge. Nine consecutive quarterly losses. Stock down 90% on the year. $8.2B in outstanding debt.

Serious doubts remain about Lucent's goal of attaining profitability and remaining relatively intact.

SBC announced it will cut its workforce and reduce CAPEX in response to a continued weak economy and outmoded regulation that could threaten the future viability of its telecommunications networks in many of its states.

CEO: "These actions ... should be of concern to every consumer ... Wholesale prices are below cost. SBC has lost 3 million retail access lines year-to-date."

AT&T is considering absorbing its two-year-old Latin American subsidiary and retiring the unit's publicly traded shares.

If the company proceeds with the proposal, it would be yet another case of a North American company's having stumbled with its investments in the Latin American telecommunications industry.

AT&T Latin America had hoped to benefit from telecommunications deregulation in the region. Those hopes died fast.

... AT&T Latin America is still losing money; ... the operation's big problem is its huge debt load; ...

With government hearings looming this week, Qwest Communications is restating nearly $1 billion in revenue from swaps of capacity on its network. It may have to adjust another $531 million in revenue from cash sales of optical capacity assets to third parties.

Investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. is in exclusive talks to buy BCE Inc.'s telephone-directories business in a deal that could be worth $1.92 billion.

Moody's cut Qwest's debt ratings, because bondholders now rank behind banks in case Qwest fails to generate enough cash to pay its debts.

The downgrade came one day after Qwest said it amended a $3.39 billion credit line, a move that analysts said eliminates concerns Qwest might seek bankruptcy this year.

This issue of the COOK Report explores peering, transit and exchanges for the first time since about 1999. While a lot has changed, a lot remains the same.

Estimates of the capacity utilization of the Tier 1 backbones show them to be lightly utilized ... Over the past five weeks we have had conversations ... [which] suggest that the [Tier 1] oligopoly is engaging in behavior that could blow up in a manner similar to the capacity swaps that blew up earlier this year.

ISPs are beginning to use tools to do load balancing of their upstream connections in real time.

The Tier Ones, by peering in their tight oligopoly, may have rendered themselves irrelevant.