Back to the Future [Telecom]

[Telecom digest moderator]

As we all know, the FCC recently issued a Public Notice (DA 09-2517),
titled "Comment Sought On Transition From Circuit-Switched Network To
All Ip Network".

As I said in comments I made at the time, I thought the FCC was
responding to President Obama's call for new investments in our
nation's infrastructure by publishing a once-over-lightly fluff piece
that would get them through the holidays without any heavy
lifting. Bluntly put, and pun intended, I thought they phoned it in.

However, it seems there is a hidden agenda, and now the real purpose
of the Commission's notice is becoming clear. I confess to being
diverted by the technical issue: IP will never be the backbone of the
voice network - a fact that is so obvious that two Senators introduced
a bill which would authorize each FCC commissioner to hire an
Electrical Engineer. The FCC, of course, doesn't need Congressional
approval to hire Electrical Engineers, but that is, as I said before,
as close to a rebuke as a major federal agency ever gets in
Washington.

However, all things come to he who waits, and now the real reason for
the FCC's notice is evident. The release of AT&T's answer to the FCC's
notice is the sound of the other shoe dropping in what now seems to me
to be a combined effort to remove a critical part of the competitive
environment: the concept of Unbundled Network Elements (UNEs), which
has been its cornerstone.

The FCC's complicity in this effort was a blunder so obvious that it
has already commenced backpedaling: on the FCC's web pages regarding
"Broadband" and "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
(Recovery Act)" they have stated that "The FCC is currently working in
coordination with the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA) to perform the FCC's role under the Recovery
Act."(1)

Right on the heels of the FCC's notice, we get AT&T's suspiciously
well-timed response. To my jaundiced eye, it looks like they are
intent on eliminating the upstart Competitive Local Exchange Carriers
(CLECs) that have been usurping what "son of Ma Bell" considers its
divine right to oversee every aspect of how Americans communicate. To
that end, they have set in motion a public fairy tale, intended to put
regulators to sleep at the same time it convinces a somnambulant
customer base that Mother knows best.

Of course, Ma Bell's former child - the former Southwestern Bell
Corp. - will need government help to make this monopolist's dream come
true. They have found a sympathetic ear at 12th Street SW: FCC
Commissioners continue to promote what amounts to a puppet show, being
conducted not for the benefit of the onlookers, but for the
pickpockets who move among them and dip into their wallets with
practiced ease.

Those of us on the receiving end have been lucky. The fact is that the
FCC blundered badly: by putting "VoIP" in front of the Potemkin
Village that has been erected to hide its dismal record of
rubber-stamping everything any Baby Bell ever wanted to do, the feds
invited investigation into the real purpose both of the notice and the
acronym: the term "VoIP", it seems, has morphed from "Voice over
Internet Protocol" to a new and more sinister meaning, i.e.,
"Very Obvious Income Protection"[TM].

I'll go further: I think AT&T's resounding arse-kissing is the first
in a long series of penny operas that will keep the masses diverted
while the "old" wire-line infrastructure is replaced by a "new"
infrastructure: one which will be unavailable to the CLECs who have
depending on UNEs for their very existence.

Of course, even if that part of the scheme doesn't work, AT&T and the
other ILECs stand to benefit: you see, fiber to the (curb|pole) can
provide enough bandwidth that local central offices aren't necessary.
Thus, the "new" infrastructure, while it replaces high-maintenance
copper, will also obviate not only most of the central-office switches
and the CO's themselves (an immensely valuable asset, since the
buildings are in the centers of every hamlet, town, and city across
the United States), but also the costly annual software upgrades the
ILECs pay for as regularly as clockwork, which Nortel and Lucent
always regarded as a permanent annuity. Of course, without the CO's,
there's no need for the ever-more-expensive union workforce that Ma
Bell has been trying to eliminate for almost a century.

The tectonic plates of the telecommunications world are starting to
shift again. Where's FEMA when we need it?

Bill Horne
Moderator

Copyright � 2009 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.

(1) http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/broadband.html
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Bill Horne
Moderator