Work and the social life have kept me out of my RSS reader for the past few days, so I was surprised to read this evening that the FCC are considering what would amount to a major decision. The FCC may overturn requirements that incumbent local exchange carriers such as Verizon and SBC lease their facilities to competitors for the delivery of DSL-based broadband Internet. Here are stories for background from Reutersand the Washington Post.
Also a good read is CompTel’s ex parte filing to the FCC in pdf format. CompTel are the industry group that represents competitive carriers’ interests. Suffice it to say that they are against a rule change.
In CompTel’s arguments they state that the concept of DSL services must be distinguished between the Internet connectivity that rides over the facility and the facility itself. On one level, this makes sense. But, the more I think about it, the more I think that the same could also be claimed of cable television services. Cable companies, like it or not, have never been required to open up their facilities to competing ISPs, nor have they ever been required to open up their transmission facilities to competition television content providers. CompTel’s argument falls apart if you begin to look for parity between how cable and telephone companies are treated
What this whole exercise got me thinking about is how cable companies are regulated and how telecommunications companies are regulated needs to change to reflect the decreasing lack of distinction between these two classes of companies. As Verizon roll out their FIOS service in my area and sign contracts with content owners to offer programming over those facilities, cable companies are planning to make aggressive pushes into branded voice over IP services to compete with the circuit-switched voice services. Both offer high speed Internet. Clearly the lines are blurring, and faster than regulation or legislation is able to reflect the new reality. It is only fair that the same requirements which apply to one class of company should apply to another as the distinctions in what they offer and what they do disappear.
The implications for eliminating these distinctions are going to be huge. We would need to change the way franchises and rights of ways are offered to these companies. I’ve complained several times on this blog that local jurisdictions themselves are very often the obstacles to facilities-based competition by making it difficult or impossible for new market entrants to lay cable. Meanwhile, how many damn times have Verizon dug up the streets in the last decade?
Today I was also reading about how voice over IP is being recognized for the threat it truly is to universal service funds, which then begs the question as to whether or not the universal service regime either may have run its course and need to be eliminated. Alternatively, should the requirement be applied equally across cable and telephone companies? Right now cable companies are exempt, yet the ability to deliver voice over IP service over a high-speed cable Internet facility puts them in the exact same service market as the traditional phone companies.
All those big promises of convergence we all spoke with joy about in the late 1990s are finally slowly becoming a reality. Hopefully the regulators will be ready.
