There's been a steady hum rolling across the telecom plains for the past few months, driven in major part by the anticipation of an FCC green-light decision that will set the regional Bell operating companies loose into all sorts of growth-oriented spending. Lately, most people have taken to saying that we're on the rebound, things are looking up, spending is coming and the industry is going to "get busy" again.

Well, I hope so. But there's this nagging part of me that doesn't get it. The RBOCs have won the war against the competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) largely by starving them out of existence. Now the Bells want to enter long-distance, video services, voice-over-IP (VoIP) services, enhanced services and other such markets, and that's how they're going to jump-start growth again and get us all to pay more money than we are today.

You buy that? I don't. While the RBOCs are financially stronger than many of their competitors, what is it that the RBOCs have won? Let's look at the general market that the RBOCs face over the next years:

• Second-line growth is negative as people cancel dial-up lines and install cable modems at a 2-to-1 pace over DSL.

• Voice lines are being disconnected (or not ordered) as more people use cell phones as their primary line.

• Features are being disconnected, and bundling options are lowering margins.

• Voice long-distance rates are moving toward $0.00 (literally) as the cost of completing calls plummets. With VoIP, calls can ride over existing networks for fractions of a cent.

• IP Centrex services are coming online as IP PBXs are the rave.

• Video is the rally cry for next-generation services to compete with cable's triple play of voice, data and video.

• Wireless LANs and hot spot services will sap 3G revenue growth.

• Robust alternatives for metropolitan networking are challenging RBOC metropolitan models.

The list goes on. Most of the near and midterm growth areas for the RBOCs are not likely to yield the results they would like to see, yet everyone is saying that "we've turned the corner" or "we've bottomed out." We might have run out of firms to go bankrupt, but clearly the RBOCs are not out of the woods - there's a lot of pain coming in the next two years.

The cable industry is going to hit hard at the small office/home office and midsize business markets with solid voice, data and video bundles. I wouldn't be surprised to see them add cellular services, too.

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