By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 12/19/05

If you're tracking telcos, 2005 has been a pretty momentous year. The big theme? Seismic shifts in the communications industry. Take a look at what's happened:

Major mergers. 2005 will go down as the year that fundamentally reshaped the face of the telecommunications playing field, with SBC buying AT&T and Verizon picking up MCI. There's more to the story than market consolidation, however. The real significance of these mergers is that they provide unassailable evidence of the flawed logic of the original 1984 division of telcos into "long-distance" and "local" carriers. Simply put, offering long-distance services alone isn't a viable business.