Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!bu.edu!telecom-request From: 0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Local Competition Comes to Illinois Bell Message-ID: Date: 4 Mar 91 02:33:00 GMT Sender: news@bu.edu.bu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 81 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 177, Message 1 of 9 In Digest v11, iss176, our Moderator opens with news from Chicago: > Illinois Bell will open its switching offices to non-Bell competitors > in a move expected to enhance competition in the arena of local > telephone service... > The new policy, effective April 7 pending final approval by the > Illinois Commerce Commission, will allow Teleport Communications and > Metropolitan Fiber Systems to interconnect their systems with Illinois > Bell. Teleport and Metropolitan Fiber are waiting now for approval, > but other competitors may be on the way. > What other communities and/or local telcos are entertaining the idea > of competition in local exchange service? What others are actually > implementing it at this time as is Illinois Bell? Actually, Pat, it's among the first visible cracks in a curtain the FCC has been pulling away at local Telcos as another facet of its drive to break the local Telco monopoly. It's part of Open Network Architecture (ONA) with an FCC requirement to provide Comparably Efficient Interconnection (CEI) to other providers in the local arena. Within the past week, New York Telephone announced it would provide similar opening of its premises. The "work" of forging this crack has been underway for quite a few years, and only now is it becoming visible. (I worked on a local fiber job in Los Angeles a year and a half ago that had entrances from others planned into the Los Angeles PacBell Building on its Grand Avenue cable vault side. Everybody close to the business knows (and knew) it was just a matter of time.) Another operative buzzword of these actions is "co-location," meaning the provision of a space inside the Telco building for the obviously needed terminal gear of the "Alternative Access Carriers," or AAC's as the Teleports and Metropolitan Fibers are coming to be called, at least from the interstate point of view. The actual means of doing this are Draconian at best. It seems to be evolving into a typical scene in which the "other parties" have to rent square feet of floor space, enclosed within a locked screen at the insistence of the local Telco to "protect" against accusation that the Telco's people ever meddled with the gear. Further, the Telco provides only AC power, not any of its already-present DC power, so the "other firms" have to duplicate a function, providing their own rectifiers and back- up power. Then, the "other parties" have to provide building heat laod information on their equipment in order to arrange a charge for the space, power consumption and cooling load. So, nobody is welcoming these interlopers into the Temple of the Telco. Fortunately, fiber technology is such that interconnection of DS-1's and DS-3's are what the Telco will accept, and the physical requirements can be met with today's technology. As to the Chicago scene, a local fiber carrier called Diginet is actually longer established and probably is in the fray as much or more than the others. Diginet actually operates all the way from Chicago to Milwaukee and has done so for a half decade already. So it's quiet in your town? That doesn't mean there's no activity. Just don't expect your Telco to announce it in your bill stuffer. They'd rather you didn't know about it. And while we have the topic of Alternative Access open, let's take note that MCI bought the transmission portion of Western Union a year or so back. That acquistion included miles and miles of Western Union conduits in the streets of more cities than any of us knew about. I knew of a list of 17 major cities where WUTCo had cables in the street for years. But I even heard of digging in the streets of Oklahoma City that exposed _wooden_ conduits marked "Western Union" just a year or so ago. At the moment, MCI is so beleagured it's doubtful they even know much about this asset, but you can expect them to either: a.) sell it in bits and pieces to the others, or b.) have a realization and announcement sometime in the future that MCI has a new business area open. It is, without doubt, an important announcement and one we will see much more of, grudgingly admitted to by the Telcos. Free market, here we come ... kicking, clawing and screaming the whole way!