No one can hear you now

I spent considerable time last week listening to established competitive service providers talk about the eminent danger of rulings in Washington such as last Thursday's partial victory by AT&T in a broadband forbearance ruling.

A lot was said about the danger to competition, but it all boils down to this: Incumbent telephone companies still control the last several feet of access into the vast majority of buildings that house U.S. businesses. Take away rules that require them to resell that access at reasonable prices and the amount of competition for business services decreases.

It's not a hard concept to grasp. It should be possible for the FCC to say it has determined, based on hard data, that a certain percent of U.S. businesses do, indeed, have access to multiple service providers over physical lines other than those provided by the incumbent, and therefore regulation of those facilities is no longer needed. But none of the three commissioners who voted on AT&T's side of the issue came out and said that. One -- Robert McDowell -- asked for more data on the topic. Beyond that, the discussion was all around encouraging investment in broadband, by taking away AT&T's need to resell what it builds to competitors.

What strikes me is the vacuum of information in which the FCC claims to be making its choices. Competitive service providers, including XO Communications, Time-Warner Telecom and others, have gone on the record saying they have provided the FCC with the data showing the lack of alternate access into most buildings. Yet it seems that either that data is being ignored or it isn't getting through to the right people.

TWT President and CEO Larissa Herda said at last week's Telephony Live conference that the competitive service provider industry needs to be coming together and speaking more loudly at this critical juncture and she's right. Herda also pointed out that the loudest voices and deepest pockets of those who battle the incumbents in Washington -- AT&T and MCI -- are now silent, leaving those who remain to dig deeper and scream louder.

The FCC still has an open proceeding on special access in which it could choose to fix some of what ails the competitive service provider segment. Again, it would be nice to see the data on which decisions are being made. How hard can that be?

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.