revenues in the telecommunications market; however, recent estimates are that voice traffic is growing at a very low (single-digit) percentage rate, while data traffic may be growing at a rate as high as 200% to 300% per year.The cable television/video delivery services part of the telecommunications industry includes the traditional (wired) cable TV providers, wireless cable TV providers, and satellite TV providers.The traditional (wired) cable TV industry serves about 65 million U.S. households, with the five largest cable multiple system operators (MSOs)--AT&T (via TCI), Time Warner, Comcast/MediaOne (whose merger is pending), Adelphia, and Cox Communications--serving nearly 45 million of those households.The fastest-growing segment of the telecommunications industry today is still the Internet market. Possibly as a result of the fact that the Internet industry is not yet regulated and strictly controlled by the government (and the FCC), there is a tremendous amount of competition in this market and a vast number of service providers At the end of 1997, it was estimated that there were some 6,000 ISPs worldwide, with about 4,500 of them located in the U.S. Gartner Group: Analytics has predicted that the number of ISPs in the U.S. will shrink to around 500 by 2002, as many smaller ISPs go out of business altogether and the survivors merge or are acquired by other telecommunications service providers. This trend is certainly well under way with the number of acquisitions and mergers that have taken place in the past year. The U.S. has one of the most extensive and advanced telecommunications networks in the world. At the end of 1998 (according to FCC figures), there were about 104 million households in the U.S., and just over 94% of them had at least one telephone, with a goodly number of them (in the 10% to 20% range) having two or more telephone lines. As of the end of 1997, the RBOCs had about 9,900 central office systems installed...
