When the world began to deregulate and privatize telecommunications, a new question arose: what would happen if an incumbent service provider proved unable to compete, and was forced out of business?
Around the turn of the century we saw many bankruptcies of non-dominant service providers, especially those providing long distance capacity services. Since then we have seen a few restructurings of smaller legacy service providers, among them Windstream.
Now it appears Frontier Communications will enter bankruptcy under laws that allow it to shed debt but continue operating.
Since national governments consider their core communications facilities to be “national assets” in a real sense, it still seems quite a remote possibility that a failed national service provider would really be allowed to go out of business.
In many countries, there is more than one service provider which plausibly could continue to serve a whole nation, even if a single major provider went out of business.
Still, the possible bankruptcy of a former national telco remains a possibility unimaginable a few decades ago.
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