Deregulation ⇒ New Suppliers

Lots of new actors as equipment suppliers
Traditional telecom equipment vendors buying datacom vendors.
Lots of mergers and acquisitions among datacom vendors.

As of Fall 2002, many of these vendors (similar to operators) were reorganizing, selling off divisions, reducing staffing, … -- due to the Telecom meltdown! However, some have survived (or been reborn) and some have not survived.

Transcript

[slide31] So, not only did we get a whole bunch of new operators, we got a whole bunch of new suppliers. And one of the first things that happened is traditional telecom companies said, hey, oops, our market is disappearing. Maybe we'd better do something about this data. So they bought datacom vendors. There were lots of mergers and acquisitions. And as of fall 2002, lots of them were in trouble because there was a huge big telecom meltdown. And it was an enormous disaster in the industry. Some survived, some were reborn, and some didn't survive.