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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Herc who wrote (3939)	5/30/1999 1:51:00 PM
From: jimpit	Respond to of 12823

Thanks, Herc. Although I've complained to Mindspring early-on by phone, I'll take your advice and send them a more formal written complaint. Regards, Jim

To: Herc who wrote (3939)	5/31/1999 5:31:00 PM
From: Stephen B. Temple	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

I might as well jump in here semi-annually with a news piece....I didn't see signs of posting back through the 26th. Sorry if I overlooked someone. Stephen techweb.com ADSL Cuts Have Far Reaching Implications (05/27/99, 7:35 p.m. ET) By Colleen Boothby, tele.com Bell Atlantic has just offered an olive branch to ISPs in a new tariff filed at the Federal Communications Commission. The proposed tariff would establish steep volume and term discounts for ADSL service. But before the tariff can take effect, however, Bell Atlantic will have to persuade the FCC to buy its interpretation of a controversial section in the 1996 re-write of the Communications Act. Bell Atlantic currently offers three flavors of ADSL depending on the downstream speed a customer wants: 640 kilobits per second, 1.6 megabits per second, and 7.1 Mbps. Upstream speeds for the 640 kbps and 1.6 Mbps services are 90kbps; for the 7.1 Mbps service, upstream is 680 kbps. For each of these services, the new tariff would establish 3-year and 5-year term plans. The 3-year plans are targeted to fairly low-volume customers, maxing out at 5,000 lines, and establish only modest discounts of about 5-10 percent ($2.00 to $11.00 per month off base rates of about $40.00 to $110.00 per month). The 5-year plans are where the real discounts are. At the highest discount level, for customers who order a million lines, the monthly charges for all three speeds drop by about 25 percent. Relations between Bell Atlantic (or any telco, for that matter) and ISPs aren't always warm and fuzzy. But recent Bell company efforts to tie cheap ADSL service to Internet access service from their affiliated ISPs have made things worse. An unaffiliated ISP, whose subscribers want to reach it using broadband services like ADSL, will be at a competitive disadvantage if the Bell company ISP affiliate gets preferential access to its sister company's ADSL services and prices. Bell Atlantic's tariff, however, is a step in the right direction, because it seeks to establish generally available discounts for customers who wish to buy at higher volumes (such as ISPs). But here's the legal hitch: When Congress re-wrote the Communications Act in 1996, it inserted mandatory discount requirements for any service sold at retail by an incumbent ILEC. The ILECs must offer "wholesale rates" for any basic telecommunications service they sell "at retail" to subscribers other than fellow common carriers. In addition, Congress put state regulatory commissions in charge of setting the level of the wholesale discount and even dictated how the commissions should set the discount. State commissions must start with the ILEC's retail rate and back out any marketing, billing, collection, and "other" costs that are avoided when the ILEC sells on a wholesale basis. The question now is whether Congress' wholesale discount requirement applies to the already-discounted volume and term plans for ADSL tariffed by Bell Atlantic with the FCC. If the statutory requirement does apply, ISPs might have to kiss ADSL volume discounts goodbye because the ILECs will be reluctant to tariff such discounts if it means living with additional, state-imposed discounts. On the other hand, parties can argue that the high-volume, discounted ADSL service that ISPs order for use by their subscribers is not a retail service ordered by the ISPs' subscribers and therefore should not be subject to the wholesale discount requirement. Bell Atlantic's tariff even includes a paragraph stating that the services provided under the volume and term plans "are not services that the Company provides at retail and, accordingly, are not subject to the rate provisions" Congress imposed in the 1996 Act. The FCC's resolution of these arguments will have a huge impact on the willingness of other ILECs to offer ADSL discounts. And there's an added complication. ISPs have argued for years that they should be treated like end users, not long distance carriers, when it comes to paying access charges. The FCC has gone along, permitting ISPs to get their local network connections from end user tariffs filed with state commissions rather than requiring ISPs to pay the per minute access charges in federal access tariffs. But the end user status of a customer may also drive the decision to classify a service as retail (and subject to the statutory discount) or wholesale: the FCC wants to classify advanced services like ADSL as retail services if they are offered "predominantly to ordinary residential or business users or to Internet service providers" rather than "telecommunications carriers." ISPs can argue that they aren't like ordinary end users and are more like telecommunications carriers when they buy high-volume ADSL offerings. But will treating ISPs as wholesale customers of ADSL in order to protect discounted ADSL services from retail status threaten ISPs' end user status for access charge purposes? The Bell Atlantic tariff is scheduled to take effect June 3. Challenges to the tariff must be filed immediately. The FCC can take action to tee these issues up in a formal proceeding or it can ignore the issues and let the tariff take effect as is. Or it can work out some compromise position with Bell Atlantic informally that would be reflected in revisions to the pending tariff.