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We're not talking about the phone company's poor record of responding to repair requests, or its responsibility for the majority of complaints fielded by Oregon's Public Utility Commission last year. Rather, we're concerned about US West's lack of investment in local high-speed telecommunication connections. "Connectivity to the Internet is key to economic development," says Rich Bader, president and CEO of Easy Street, a Beaverton-based Internet service provider. "US West [has failed] to invest in enhancing its infrastructure and customer service." "US West is a drag on the entire information economy," echoes Jim Rudnick, director of Internet services at Imagina. "The problems at US West are greater than bad wires and held orders." "We try to get US West to put more money in Oregon," laments Laurie Itkin, Gov. Kitzhaber's telecommunications policy adviser. "At the senior level locally, they're committed. But there's some disconnect between senior management here and Denver [where the company has its headquarters]." As recently as 1992 and 1993, US West was promising high-speed fiber connections for all of Portland. Instead, the company chose to "re-engineer" its telecommunications business. That's corporate speak for downsizing. In addition to eliminating numerous local operators' jobs, US West also did away with hundreds of mid-level engineering positions and scrapped plans for the promised fiber-optic network. What came of the savings? A big chunk went into billion-dollar cable acquisitions in other states and other countries. In fact, US West's non-telephone business is being spun off into a separate company called MediaOne. Here's the hitch: MediaOne's service territory includes Washington, Idaho, California and Nevada--every state in the region, that is, save Oregon. Spokesman Jim Haynes acknowledges one of the most painful results of his company's re-engineering process: When it comes to telecommunications connectivity in Oregon, US West "will always be playing catch-up," he says. The experience of Palo Alto, Calif., offers an instructive alternative. There, according to a recent article in The New York Times, "a combination of public and private investment has created the highest-capacity switching point on the Internet." The result? That city's main drag is "bustling with engineers, programmers, venture capitalists and hackers drawn by the chance to grab a chunk of bandwidth in the land rush of the information age." Where does this leave Portland? Without greater vision--and investment--from our leading telecommunication company, we'll remain on the outskirts of the Silicon Rainforest. |
