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The larger carriers would dearly love to be your one-stop shop for everything. Your voice, your data, your voicemail, your DID lines, your frame relay and Internet access--all on one bill. Realistically, I doubt any customer actually wants that or that these huge monolithic companies can deliver. It's frighteningly like getting all your news from one source.

The good news is some of us are starting to see costs drop. Historically, long-distance service fees have dropped by about 70 percent since the breakup of AT&T back in the early '80s. Currently, some of us are seeing up to 25 percent savings. So, let's boil it down to the basics. You r present phone company, whoever it is, would love to keep you. The new phone company in town, whoever it is, would love to have you as a customer. Your competition probably isn't working on this as aggressively as they could be. A window of opportunity exists to get some cost relief by negotiating now for your local service. The window is not very large and the benefits are incremental, but every bit helps.

The best strategy is to become an aggregator. State and large local governments are probably the best example of this. They have many disassociated agencies, departments and initiatives all clamoring for bandwidth. Intelligent managers take the lead and make sure of the following: the availability of the right product or service at the right time, the quality of that service, the choice for that service, and finally, the price of that service. By using that model and looking within your organization, you can try to aggregate purchas es and shop for the best buying power.

The gauntlet has been throw n and the real players are racing to become the supercarriers of the future.

How will we know when the future arrives? We'll know when we look around and see others besides huge companies becoming bloated, struggling to become so-so regional Bells; when consumers have a real choice for leading-edge technology that we can leverage; when we can look around and see new technologies with faster and cheaper bandwidth and growth beyond the downtown Sonet rings that branch out into the suburban and rural areas.

Brian Walsh is the founder of bwalsh.com, a networking technology consulting firm in Portland, Ore., specializing in Internet and client/server product strategies, development and testing. He can be reached at www.bwalsh.com.