Who will be the leaders?

Demand for connectivity is driving the demand for raw communications capacity; but Who will provide it?

Telecommunications companies like to fancy themselves as "value-added providers for information." The truth, however, is that to survive in the new world, they must shed notions of providing information and must measure themselves by a single metric: dollars per bit per second. They are no different than electrical, water, sewer, or any other utility competing for the right to push stuff through a pipe. -Carl Malamud[1]:

[1] Viewpoint: An airline-style price war looms in telecommunications, Carl Malamud, in IEEE Spectrum, January, 1995, pg. 32.