Fiddling with the network: Competitors fired up over SBC's Pronto architecture

Opposition is mounting to SBC Communications' new network architecture at the heart of Project Pronto, its $6 billion high-speed data services rollout.

Competitive carriers claim that the network design, announced two weeks after the company agreed to meet regulatory conditions for approval of the SBC/Ameritech merger, would restrict integrated voice and data providers' ability to offer competing services and render useless much of the equipment installed at SBC's central offices (COs).

SBC even has filed a document with the FCC, asking to wave some of the conditions attached to its merger with Ameritech, particularly those related to SBC's ownership of some of the equipment that would be part of the network.

"Substantively, [the design] continues to push competitors back into the core of the network while everybody has been spending to go to the edge of the network," said Randy Lowe, chief legal officer at integrated provider Prism Communication Services.

SBC, however, claims competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) are overreacting. "They want to have the authority and the right to mandate how a telco designs its network. We don't believe the FCC would ever entertain such a radical idea," said Paul Mancini, vice president and assistant general counsel for SBC.

With Project Pronto, SBC wants to offer asymmetrical DSL to 80% of its customers but doing so requires a shortening of its local loops to less than 12,000 feet by moving its DSL access multiplexers (DSLAMs) further out from the CO and into 20,000 widely dispersed remote terminals.

The terminals would be housed in huts, vaults and cabinets of varying sizes, many of which, including the Alcatel Litespan 2000, are not large enough to support co-location. The remote terminals also would have next generation digital loop concentrators (DLCs), so SBC could provide voice and DSLAM functionality from the same box.

Competitive carriers that base their business plans on providing integrated voice and data services over unbundled facilities see the design as a slap in the face because it would move the subscriber base out of host COs and make it difficult for them to offer both services.

"CapRock Communications' only alternative to serve those customers is to deploy a similar next generation DLC platform at the [remote terminal] location with our own fiber transport back to the host," according to an affidavit by Leo Cyr, chief operating officer of CapRock. The magnitude of co-locating nearly 20,000 remote terminals would be cost prohibitive and "crippling" to CLECs, Cyr said.

SBC needs a waiver to the merger conditions for the plan to work because those conditions require data affiliates to own and operate such equipment. CompTel, other organizations and providers are urging the FCC to deny SBC's waiver request and open the matter to further inquiry.

"The bottom line is that they have to give us equal access," said Dhruv Khanna, executive vice president and general counsel for Covad Communications.