Toward a new generation of user groups

There's something about the nationwide wave of DSL customer service disaster stories that has touched a nerve. All over the Internet, sites and organizations are popping up to battle the big carriers over rotten DSL service, and, while they're at it, a lot of other problems as well.

If you haven't had the chance, check out a few of the following: www.ihatethephonecompany.com, www.consumersvoice.org, www.findbetterservice.com, www.xdslresource.com, www.uswestsucks.net (and its sister site, www.tsewq.com -- that's Qwest spelled backward).

Some of these sites and groups can be crude or amateurish, and as always there's potential for infiltration and manipulation by rivals to whatever carrier is being criticized. (Example: www.voicesforchoices.org, a new, slightly-too-slick anti-Bell organization with the telltale AT&T listed among its members.)

Still, there's a lesson for the old-line business telecom user groups in this grass-roots anger: You gotta find out what keeps people up at night and make those your issues to attack. As it happens, this lesson may have to be learned by a whole new generation of user groups. The old generation, literally going back more than 50 years, is now almost moribund.

The last to stumble is the International Communications Association (ICA), a once-prestigious organization founded in 1948 that brought together billions of dollars of corporate telecom spending power to serve as the voice of the user.

Now after years of slow decline, the ICA is scrambling to find a place for its annual meeting, having been all but booted out of the SuperComm trade show.

The reasons for ICA's troubles -- following similar woes of several other groups mentioned in the article -- are rooted in a sense of policy inertia. As this column has warned in the past, ICA has continued to focus on extremely old-fashioned voice telecom issues right on through the Internet revolution. With no apparent attempt to really probe its members' opinions, ICA has mostly injected itself in largely intercarrier debates having to do with the formulas under which carriers pay each other for access and universal service.

All this has happened while, right under its nose, a veritable installation and provisioning crisis for everything from asymmetric DSL service for the residential user to OC-3 links for the Fortune 100 have overwhelmed carriers mired in energy-sapping mergers, divestitures and other assorted reorganizations.

The next group that comes along to represent business voice and data users should consider demanding meetings with carrier CEOs, not just joining in Washington alliances to make me-too filings before the Federal Communications Commission. But even in Washington, government officials anxiously await briefings by genuine user groups backed by strong internal research and, dare I say it, a bit of passion.

New FCC Chairman Michael Powell has admitted he's spent so much time since 1997 as an FCC commissioner listening to rival groups of vendors argue the issues that he sometimes loses track of where the real user benefit lies. Anyone available to help Mr. Powell out?

» posted by ITworld staff

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