Carrier Challenges Abound as

In the next five years the telecom market will change so dramatically and rapidly that government intervention and market engineering will be inevitable in some countries, according to Gartner. At the center of this is the global trend toward telecom "structural separation," which Gartner defines as the deconstruction or breaking apart of a telecom carrier's vertically integrated business model into a more horizontally structured model. "In the past 20 years, carriers have increasingly focused on operational efficiency -- via a tighter coupling of business assets (vertical integration) -- to compete more effectively against new market entrants with lower cost structures," said Alex Winogradoff, research vice president at Gartner. "Despite government moves (such as unbundling and accounting separation) to encourage competition and stimulate investment, progress has been meager in most countries. Regulators believe that continued vertical integration is the primary reason for this lack of progress and are increasingly seeking separation as a policy tool." Gartner said that telecom regulators have been pursuing accounting separation and are now considering functional and ownership separation as a last measure to achieve their policy goals.
http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/323672