s) Source: www.quote.yahoo.com and company reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission. a. Author's estimate. Clearly, the financial markets place a very low value on these companies' long-distance assets, little more than the value of the cable television indus- try's home shopping networks. 26 There is even speculation that the sole remaining independent long-distance company of any value, AT&T, will be bought by one of the Bell companies or be sold to a group of private investors. 27 Long-Distance Company Investment It is possible that the long-distance companies could not have survived in a competitive environment under any circumstances once the Bell compa- nies were free to offer in-region interLATA services. All the same, these long-distance carriers hastened their own demise by investing far too heav- ily in new facilities. As figure 6-4 shows, capital expenditures on long- distance networks quadrupled (in nominal dollars) between 1996 and 2000 despite falling capital equipment prices. 28 At the same time, their total revenues, net of resale, did not increase very much between 1996 and 1999 and then began to fall in 1999. As of October 2004, all the major long-distance carriers are reporting further sharp declines in long-distance revenues (see table 6-5). Between 1996 and 2001, the five major long-distance carriers spent about $120 billion on their networks. By June 30, 2004, all but two of those networks were close to being worthless on the financial markets (table 6-4). There may have been a reason to increase capital spending somewhat between 1996 and 2000, given telecom's shift from voice to The Death of Distance and of the Long-Distance Carriers Figure 6-4. Long-Distance Carrier End-User Revenues and Capital Expenditures, 1996-2002 Billions of dollars Revenues CapEx Source: FCC, Telecommunications Industry Revenues, 2002 (March 2004); CreditSuisse/First Boston (2003). data, but it is unlikely that any of the companies' investment plans were based on an assumption of falling revenues after 2000