Oh, and, a pretty good contrarian indicator is simply to do the opposite of what sell-side analysts tell you. They're usually too short sighted to get the big picture of things.

Don't know much about telecoms, but this is interesting. I've never thought about looking at regional telco plays. While the big guys struggle for marketshare in upmarket services, someone's got to pick up the slack operating rural local and long distance services. There's no real capital expenditure necessary as infrastructure is all there, so if properly managed I could see this as a mature industry that could generate some decent cash flow if operated by the right management. Kind of like a Warren Buffet play on the newspaper industry. Granted, FairPoint in particular doesn't seem to be a very interesting investment at all right now. I'm just bringing it up because I never really looked into these types of companies.