Cherry picking: Incumbent LECs defend their competitive ground

The United States Telephone Association is on the war path again, this time refuting complaints that its members, local exchange carriers, aren't opening their markets to competitors.

Telcos have made significant progress in letting rivals break into local markets, said USTA President and Chief Executive Officer Roy Neel at a Washington press briefing last week.

The five Bell regional holding companies and GTE have lost nearly 1 million telephone lines to long-distance carriers and other new rivals, most of them for business customers, Neel said. The figure amounts to less than 1% of all lines nationally.

Local and interexchange carriers regularly accuse each other of blocking or slowing competition as they fight over how to interpret the act's mandates.

Last week, Neel accused MCI Communications Corp. and other carriers of deliberately avoiding local residential markets as a way to delay competition on their own turf from the RHCs.

"[IXCs] can't be allowed to have it both ways. They shouldn't be allowed to have a business strategy that allows them to exclude the residential market," Neel said.

MCI officials blame LECs for the delay in local competition, saying they use "tactics that delay, disrupt and discriminate," including costly, one-time fees for customer switches and problem-laden support systems.

MCI also sells local service to households in California, New York and Michigan and plans to add four states by the end of the year. It is spending $1.7 billion to build local networks.

* The RHCs and GTE will spend more than $4 billion by the end of this year to open their markets to new competition

* The RHCs and GTE are processing about 7000 competitive orders daily

* Major long-distance carriers are bypassing residential customers and offering local phone service to businesses