..open local phone lines to DSL competitors ..
Hello-- I share your view, in principle, and have felt that
way ever since we had various municipalities/cities/counties
throughout the country in lawsuits to open up cable access
for competitors. (AOL, @home, GTE etc.)
At first glance, the copper local loop would seem to be
exactly the same and we might apply exactly the same
principles. There is one difference and I would like to
explain and share from first hand experience.
We have the ILEC that owns/operates/repairs/enhances the
copper pairs. For the most part, the stodgy ILECs have
failed miserably over the past few years in coming to grips
with the "data revolution". They failed in ISDN and now,
seeing the competition for the other avenues into your home,
cable in particular, have suddenly gotten religion. They
have implemented the DSL stopgap, mostly ADSL and a
smattering of other variants. These stodgy ILECs, PacBell,
BellSouth, others, struggle by themselves to make it work
while the numerous competitors, the COVADs, the Rhythms
etc., where they can, have mostly blown the ILECs away with
better implementations, and better service.
In my case, BellSouth, they have implemented ADSL, the same
as the other ILECs with the common purchase agreements. So
far, so good. Now, these ILECS struggle to keep up with
customer demand, they still fail to provision the
infrastructure that is necessary to keep up with the DSL
customer and data traffic growth. As a result, regional
outages are a daily occurance, sometimes for 10-20 hours,
customer support is woefully inadequate, technical expertise
is not up to the level that is required to build and grow
the data infrastructure-- in general, we still deal with
stodgy ILECs.
It is exactly this environment that competition can bring
improvement to the customer. I won't bore you with the
hours and hours of wasted time on telephone with semi-
literate technical support, and troubletickets and
escalations and all that. From my perspective, BLS is
failing. I sure wish we had competition for the DSL portion
of my copper pairs as it might shake these stodgy ILECs
into action. Meanwhile, in BLSs' case, they strive to
achieve LD by satisfing the FCC on "openness". So, let us
open up the DSL spectrum portion of my copper loop. |
