The SBC business structure for implementing PRONTO is not clear to me, but it is important in many ways. RE: "But apparently SBC will merge their entertainment arm to the twisted copper pair(??). Well that means, "VDSL." <MikeM54321>.
The "merge" here may just be a figure of speech, but the notion raises the issue of whether all of PRONTO will reside in a separate subsidiary. Seems it has to, according to what SBC agreed to in the merger conditions. If PRONTO is out in a sub, then they will pay the "newly discounted" not-exactly UNE price for copper pairs needed for PRONTO. This is more than the ILEC's old ADSL-service cost for access facilities (previously $0), but down from what COVAD claimed would be ruinous for low-priced residential service ($18 - $22). The attractiveness of parking the business in a subsidiary (even if it was not a condition of merger approval) would arise in part from taking any newly-built high-speed digital facilities off the table for any prospective UNE creation, i.e., the FCC later deciding that a new UNE will be a digital channel including the subloop from the NGDLC-housed DSLAM, plus the DSLAM slot, and shared facilities back to the CO.
A potential unattractive consequence of PRONTO in the unregulated subsidiary involves the voice services over PRONTO that SBC touts. At some point, if an ILEC (or CLEC, for that matter) does enough voice service in a unregulated subsidiary or on an unregulated basis, you have to expect that the states will demand consideration of the intrastate angle, and probably get some state-regulatory hooks into the "unregulated" entity. Same goes for the FCC -- at what level of voice service penetration over the digital network does the access charge exemption for "new" digital services become an anachronism? Are we already there?
I personally would not expect Kennard to tackle this issue, but his reluctance for introducing regulatory oversight into the internet may not be shared by others applying the concept of consistent regulation of services (including intrastate and interstate voice) rather than a Kennard distaste for regulating a network facility (the internet.)
In the mean time, for an ILEC, and even an ambitious CLEC with big VoIP plans, this is a non-trivial strategic issue. |
