DSL Prime News: The Inside Source

A leak from the FCC says a deal on line sharing has been reached because the RBOCs are about to build fiber, and therefore no longer hate sharing their outdated copper networks.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [January 30, 2003]

"The Bells are about to build fiber, and that explains the coming FCC decisions."
—Leak from the top of the FCC

Powell is apparently cutting a private deal with Seidenberg and Whitacre. He will give them less competition, and they will promise to build out a fiber or VDSL network. Powell hopes to change a public relations disaster into a dream of a brighter future. Verizon's Link Hoewing in the Globe wrote of optical futures and "high capacity with a flexible data network connecting all homes." Never underestimate the telcos' $300 million communication and public policy budget—they know how to shape a public debate.

Sounds good, so far. Press releases aren't real service, however, and we all know the Bells promised a fiber build in 1996 to get the Telecom Act passed. Unfortunately, "everyone" in telecom is laughing at the thought the Bells will go to fiber soon, and the proposals circulating at the FCC won't accomplish the goals Powell, Abernathy and Martin share. (I hope "everyone" is wrong, of course.)

Meanwhile, Kevin Martin says the Chairman has not done the work to protect line-sharing. Read the court decison, not the news reports, and you'll see the FCC has to consider issues like cable competition, and then can rule based on the evidence. They now have thousands of pages of testimony on those points, and any FCC lawyer can justify linesharing with a couple of days' work. Independents have less than 10 percent of consumer broadband with line sharing. The 90 percent+ telco/cable duopoly has produced U.S. prices 25-60 percent higher than other countries. That's a textbook example of insufficient competition.

The last draft of the new regs I saw aims at a high speed build but is full of loopholes. It will not deliver fiber to any significant number of consumers before Powell gets his chance to run for Governor of Virginia. One problem is that the equipment the Bells are already buying—Alcatel DSLAMs, AFC and Alcatel remotes—have already been redesigned to allow an upgrade to fiber. Sensible telcos are demanding the new designs, wanting some future flexibility. It can easily be defined as "fiber grade, capable of delivering 50-100 Mbps"—and destroy the unbundling and sharing requirements. An early draft thought DSL speeds were currently limited to 1.5 Mbps, when all the equipment is designed for 7 Mbps already and the new chips are delivering 12 Mbps to hundreds of thousands in Japan. Language in pending proposals is so ambiguous as to invite a decade of lawsuits rather than actual delivery of services.

I know some damn serious people at the top of the telcos are trying to find a way to deliver a faster internet. They want to be ready if the Technet crowd persuades D.C. to subsidize technology giants like farmers—or if cable competition gets rough. Comcast has phones in 30 percent of the homes passed in Orange County, and VOIP is working.

Linesharing: FCC has the data to protect it
Thanks, Kevin Martin, for pointing the way
Jason Oxman, Tom Koutsky, or some other competent CLEC lawyer: drop whatever you're doing tomorrow, and write a brief for the D.C. Court on FCC line sharing. Then send it out to the press (I'll lend my list) to make clear the court has not ordered the commission to eliminate line sharing. Folks who want to kill competition are spreading a lie in D.C., that the court ordered the FCC to end line sharing, and unfortunately some press reports picked that up. The language of the D.C. Circuit remand says nothing of the sort. The FCC was ordered to consider several issues, like competition from cable, but the order is clear: as long the FCC considers these issues, including cable competition, the commission can decide based on the record.

The Triennial gives a full record on that issue, clearly carefully considered by the FCC. Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy knows that ending line sharing kills consumer DSL competition, and she's promised the surviving CLECs she won't force them out of the business. I hope she delivers.

Copyright 2003 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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