Talk:Telecoms crash

Discussion

The first paragraph in this article makes no sense to me, it doesn't say what the crash was at all, it simply compares the boom to that of the dot-com boom which it, at best, grossly oversimplifies.

Mahewa (talk) 18:57, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I am building referneces for this.

the german and uk governments offerred auctions of the 3g radio space for limited slots to a larger number of companies around 2000. they made this sealed bid, and therefore to not win was to be pushed out of the business.

this had a catostophic effect on european telecoms workers, throwing around 100,000 of them out of work by the end of 2001 (30k in the uk)

i have one very strong reference (published in electronics world) and other good sources.

i was prompted to do this because i have seen references to politicians aplauding this as good windfall tax gathering, when in fact it was meddling and destroying a section of industry.

Robin48gx 21:47, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

That's absolutely fine, but the reason I flagged the page was because, when created, it contained no content other than its title repeated. I would suggest (if you're looking to build the page) that you use a sandbox of your own user space to do so before migrating the completed page to the main name-space. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to leave a message on my talk page. Giles Bennett ^{(Talk, Contribs)} 21:49, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

ok better go to sleep now. I'll tidy it up later and get proper refs in. I have only really put technical stuff on wiki b4 but feel this is something missing from wikipedia. I hope others can fill in more detail later. Robin48gx 21:59, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

This whole article is written very strongly from the point of view of the telecoms companies. It is badly in need of an analysis of the costs and benefits of the auctions for governments, tax payers and telecoms users. 16:28, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

This article is very biased!

This article on "Telecoms crash" is hugely biased, and has no idea neither about auction theory nor the nature of innovation and risks.

thats possibly being very unfair to who ever wrote it. these were auctions for the continued
existance and trading of the telcos involved and more bidders were in the game than licences
offered. diabetics bidding for insulin is a fair analogy !

First of all, ex-post it is true that telcos lost a huge money on the bids, but this does not mean that ex-ante the process was badly designed.

They were badly designed. Look at the refs in the article. An industry watchdog of the 
type that does not exist in europe, PULLED similar auctions the year before in the USA
because they could see the damage they would cause by loading the telcos with debt.
READ THE BLOODY REFS. OR go and police wiki on some simpler pages Robin48gx (talk) 13:40, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Moreover, just by looking back, seeing that ex-ante someone bid more than it would like to bid ex-post, does not mean that the results should be cleared. As such a behavior might lead to bids freely bidding more, because they can always expect the government to clear overpriced results.

But why could the "telco crash" be a success from an ex-ante point of view? (This is the proper way of judging a risky situation.) 1. Second-price sealed bid auction don't suffer from the winner's curse effect present with many other types of auctions. So this was a good choice. 2. There were fever licences auctioned of, than competing bidders. Hurray, this means they could not act as monopolies, having a nice piece for everyone, instead they had to reveal they real expected income from the licences. Moreover, given the nature of the telco industry (huge fixed costs and network effects), the number of entrants is naturally limited. This means, that proper competition can be reached only with ex-post market regulation.

Unfortunately, it turned out that their expected income was overestimated, but this was not because of the auction process (remember, second price auctions don't bear the winner's curse)! And if the market participants don't have proper expectations of the future market size, then who does? Certainly not the government, so beauty contests are not possible (beauty contest is the name of (let's say) non-auction procurement).

selling the spectrum is a stealth tax (in effect a tax on free air). 
eventually the consumer pays. the government has the right to regulate 
it and charge admin fees for doing that, but it is not automatic that 
the have the right to 'sell' it. In fact it worked this way until the auctions.  

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.106.115.105 (talk) 14:40, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Finally, one more question remains: who owns the spectrum initially? Are those the people living in the country, and so represented by the government, or rather the telcos? If it's the former, then the government SHOULD try to ask for the highest possible amount that the telcos are willing to pay, as this is in the best interest of the voters. Another way for securing the consumers the highest value is to forcing somehow the telcos to price at their zero-profit level, once they are already active. Unfortunately, although someone might like this idea, in reality it's almost impossible to implement. While it's quite easy to implement an outcome, where the telcos pay their expected profits ex-ante, at the auction to the government. Later the government let's them operate more freely (kind of monopolies as they are by nature), but still can reduce taxes and compensate consumers from the licence fees at the auctions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by

the telcos are still charged corporation tax ! taxing the spectrum just meant *another* tax
for them to pay, and one which stipped investment and r&d capital

82.224.13.200 (talk) 14:15, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Please mark the factual discrepancies or remove the banner. 81.106.115.105 (talk) 14:53, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Neutrality

This article is clearly not written from a neutral point of view. It reads like it was written by a shareholder in a telecoms company! Just look at the entirely unreferenced "Massive Job Losses" section with its dubious and unreferenced claims that "within a year 100,000 jobs were lost in telecoms support and development across Europe" and "losses due to the fall in income tax and corporation tax quickly swallowed up any windfall gains". These are big claims and cannot remain in the article unless they are properly referenced - with inline references. They can't just be supported by an unspecified source buried in the reference list. Claims like these should be attributed to someone, and balanced by discussion of alternative views. I have added the POV-Check template to the article as a result of these problems, and those identified by 82.224.13.200. Alboran (talk) 12:45, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

the david rudd reference gives the 30k jobs in the uk and 100k jobs lost in europe — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.5.183.25 (talk) 11:58, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

It reads more like an insider on a telecoms development compnay. Lucent ? Ericsson ? Alcatel ? There is too much underlying technical knowledge of the R&D cycle. The 100,000 jobs does appear to come from a article in electronics and Wireless World, wrtitten by a phD, and I have heard that before. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.75.237.104 (talk) 08:35, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Also the auctions were badly designed. Similar auctions were run in the USA a year before with similar results. HOWEVER, an industry watchdog realised that the level of debt ncurred would cause damage to the US telecoms industry and demanaded the auctions re-run! Read some of the references in this article before slapping POV tags all over it. Go and remove some of the really daft pages on wiki. This one is well ref'ed. Robin48gx (talk) 13:35, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Bias

Agree with some of the comments above. This article is grossly biased throughout. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.33.179.1 (talk) 10:44, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Bias

I also agree with the comments relating to some of the conclusions this article draws. The auctions were only a siptom of the whole telecoms boom that imediately preceded the telecoms crash of 2000. Of far greater impact was the assumption by equipment vendors that the above trend growth in revenue of the proceeding five years, that had largely been driven by the "Y2K scare" would continue indefinately. When the gaps in the future CAPEX expenditure forecasts started to become obvious (Q1-Q2 2000) that is what really started to spook the markets. Many of the vendors played games to try and hide the reality, but eventually they could only stretch facts so far and hence the eventual bursting of the bubble.

The impact of the auctions only made it worse as it dragged the operators into the whole sorry mess caused by overly optimistic forecast of future market revenues. For some reason nobody really took into account that market saturation would eventually impact revenue growth, go figure. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.50.49.255 (talk) 09:16, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I have added a neutrality banner, as the article is still clearly biased, the language is unsuitable and the references and citations are insufficient and out of date regarding current literature on the subject. Rooneyot (talk) 12:49, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Not even just a matter of neutrality - the whole thing basically is just a personal essay. At any rate, that's how it reads. --91.84.214.151 (talk) 18:13, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Theses

Wikipedia articles should not be used to advance novel theses. If the thesis being advanced is not novel, it should be possible to cite someone else saying it - and then describe it as a claim rather than a fact, if it is contested - as the thesis of this article clearly is! If it is novel, then it's original research. I've tagged the article as original research because it appears to be.--greenrd (talk) 08:12, 20 January 2015 (UTC)