Ma Bell’s Justin Sims thinks that the fiber networks which were build during the boom are going to be unused and will go to waste, according to a report in The Asian Wall Street Journal. He predicts more companies will go under, and others will struggle to recoup their investments.

bq. Sims said bandwidth prices, the charge for transmitting data from place to place, will continue to fall until they are equal to the costs of keeping the networks running, costs that increase as new customers are added.

I have been ranting about that for years now, but hopefully more people would pay attention. The most interesting part of this story is that Sims comes out and talks about AT&T’s plans to pick up some distressed assets.

bq. “We continue to look at distressed assets, both in Asia and other parts of the world, but each time we look at those distressed assets, we generally conclude that it is cheaper to lease infrastructure than it is to own,” he said.