Intel Corp chief executive Andy Grove has slammed European and American telephone companies as uncompetitive monopolists holding back the computer industry through slow implementation of ISDN and xDSL lines. Technically there’s nothing on the way to move us to higher bandwidth than ISDN, he said adding that aside from Germany, implementation of ISDN had been very slow. Grove told a business seminar in London. He claimed they were dragging their feet in the move into the kind of fierce competitive model that has driven the computer industry. The telecommunications industry has a government monopoly legacy, and to a very large extent is still in monopoly mode. Telcos are not doing enough, Grove said. The telecommunications industry is technologically superb, but it is not used to delivering its services in a competitive environment. The sooner we manage to move telcos into a competitive construct, the better. Taking the supply of ISDN lines in the US as an example, Grove said: Where I live, you need a prayer and the patience of Job to get an ISDN connection from the local phone company, which wishes ISDN would go away like a bad dream, and does everything to make it a bad dream for the customer.
