Do the phone companies owe us $200 billion?

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 02/02/2006 - 09:32

A new book alleges that the phone companies owe every household in America $2000, or about $200 billion in total. Just released (disclaimer: I have not had a chance to read it yet), the book is already creating a lot of discussion online.

The dollar figures allegedly come from calculations the author has performed by looking at the increases in phone and broadband costs over the past decade and comparing them to what the phone companies promised to do in the mid-nineties.

As someone who worked for AT&T in the early eighties, both before and after the break up, I tend to be skeptical of phone company conspiracy theories. I saw so much bad management I have a hard time visualizing the kind of diabolical master plans some people want to see--a lot of it is just plain myopia and lack of vision.

But there is no denying some of the author's key allegations, because they have been rigorously documented by many sources--we rank 16th in the world for broadband deployment, and have some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the world, by a wide margin.