ar too high. In the last two years, all of these companies have been writing down these assets, selling a vari- ety of other assets, and aggressively trying to reduce the debt they issued to make acquisitions in the past few years. Conclusion The world's telecom crisis in 2001-03 was driven in no small part by the major national telecommunications carriers investing heavily outside their Telecom Reform in Other Countries Figure 9-4. Stock Performance of Foreign ILECs Index, December 1997 = 100 February 2000 June 2004 Source: www.finance.yahoo.com a. TI quotes are for February 2000 and June 2003. BT = British Telecom, NTT = Nippon Telephone & Telegraph Corporation, FT = France Telecom, DT = Deutsche Telekom, TEF = Telifonica (Spain), and TI - TelecomItalia. own borders in wireless and Internet-driven ventures. The incumbents that "stayed home" and attended to their traditional businesses, such as Telefonica, Telecom Italia, and the U.S. Bell companies, have survived in much better condition-although exposed to the declining revenues from traditional telecom services. None of the OECD regulatory policies examined in this chapter favored entrants as much as those erected by the United States. As a result, they have fostered less narrowband competition than in the United States, but they also left fewer bankrupt entrants littering the telecom landscape in 2003-04. In most countries, mass-market competition in voice services comes from wireless services, not new wire-based entrants. Only Japan has used local-loop unbundling as aggressively as the United States, but Japanese policy has been confined largely to broadband services. Given the enormous losses being recorded by the parent of the principal Japanese broadband entrant, Yahoo-Broadband, it is far from clear that this policy will achieve its ultimate goal. Korea has the greatest Telecom Reform in Other Countries broadband penetration of any country in the world and boasts three major broadband competitors despite having no unbundling policy until recently. The E