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"Telcom Capital" loses another BBN is latest high-tech firm to exit Massachusetts By W. David Gardner, EE Times Cambridge, Mass. -- Talk about bad timing. Last month, Massachusetts awarded itself the title of Telecommunications Capital--presumably of the universe. The coronation was based on a bullish study of telecom employment in the Bay State, a study issued by a group headed by Stephen Levy, the former chairman of BBN Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. Now BBN, which is being acquired by GTE Corp., is moving to Dallas. Massachusetts has a long history of pioneering high-tech businesses, only to lose control--and subsequent jobs--to companies in other parts of the nation. Just last month, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced it would move its Massachusetts workstation operation to Colorado. The former Apollo Computer Inc. invented the workstation, only to be overtaken by Sun Microsystems Inc. Likewise, oldtimers remember that transistor and semiconductor pioneer William Shockley nearly started his pioneering company in Massachusetts with financing from the Raytheon Co. When Shockley and Raytheon couldn't get together, Shockley moved to Palo Alto, Calif., where he helped plant the seeds that grew into Silicon Valley. In 1994, networking leader Wellfleet Communications Inc. joined Synoptics Communications Inc. in 1994 to form Bay Networks Inc., whose center of power steadily shifted from Wellfleet's Billerica, Mass., home to Santa Clara, Calif. And Cascade Communications Corp.--the all-time highest flying Massachusetts telecommunications company, which had a market valuation of more than $6 billion at one point--is being acquired by Ascend Communications Corp. of Alameda, Calif. But there is some good news. In the study of telecom jobs, the report prepared by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for the Massachusetts Telecommunications Council maintains that the Bay State leads the nation in per capita concentration of employment in key aspects of telecommunications, including Internet service and products, and hardware and software. And Levy? He's still optimistic about the prospects of his home state. As he told The Boston Globe: "We're still on the cutting edge of where this industry is going." "Many people are just not aware of how big a telecommunications capital Massachusetts is," he said. The report noted that nearly 30,000 telecommunications jobs associated with the Internet--representing about one-third of the 90,000 telecommunications jobs in the state--had been created since 1993. (Next article.)
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