On the wrong track?: BellSouth disputes FCC's thumbs-down ruling

BellSouth appears ready to appeal the FCC's rejection of its request to offer long-distance service in South Carolina.

Officials were still hammering out details last week but are concerned with the FCC's apparent change of heart about the application process, said Bill McCloskey, BellSouth's director of media relations.

BellSouth sought the long-distance approval under Track B, in which an incumbent Bell company must show that no potential competing service provider has asked to connect to its network. The FCC ruled that BellSouth was ineligible to take the Track B route because it had received such requests.

BellSouth disagrees. When the FCC rejected a request from SBC to provide long-distance service in Oklahoma, it stipulated that the incumbent had to show that potential competitors were making no effort to enter the local market, McCloskey said.

"Now [the commissioners] seem to have changed their minds again-it doesn't matter whether competitors are making a serious effort, as long as they have asked for interconnection," he said.

But the BellSouth decision is the first long-distance ruling issued by the newly reconstituted FCC. One of the commission's four new members-Michael Powell-advised the Bell company how to make its long-distance efforts work. Newspaper ads and letter-writing campaigns are not the way to go, he warned, but neither is FCC reliance on burdens of proof and other legal devices.

One area of particular confusion involves unbundled network elements (UNEs). The FCC and the Eighth Circuit Court, which overturned the FCC's interconnection pricing order, should stop perpetuating the myth that incumbent local exchange carriers can physically unbundle most of the elements and that a new entrant can pick them up and recombine them, according to Powell.

"We should be dedicating our efforts toward crafting a method for allocating costs for UNEs that simulates the fiction of unbundling and rebundling, rather than spending time pretending that there are actually ways to take these elements apart, hand them to an entrant and have that entrant put them back together like pieces in a Lego play set," he said.