[Cialug] Iowa Municipal Telecom Legisation

[Michael Osten]

>
> ILECs operate with much less oversight than the public imagines.

Or far more depending on who you ask.  The IUB is an acronym to pay 
attention to around here.


> SBC for
> example gets multimillion dollar fines for anticompetitive behavior 
> and just
> pays them as a cost of doing business.

SBC bills millions a minute.  A multi-million dollar fine doesn't 
matter much.  But I'm afraid SBC is the extreme.  I know people that 
run the sgi billing systems at Sprint.  I was told that a one minute 
total outage would cost 50 million.

>  Nothing in the ILEC-CLEC relationship
> is steered to the benefit of the CLEC, especially after the TRO 
> expiration
> and the removal of most of the enterprise loops (OCn and up) and UNE-P 
> pots
> services.
>

As it should be.  CLEC's are a gift to the public to try to open up 
competition when the Bell's were torn down.  The government regulated 
that the ILEC's make their networks available at a reasonable (and 
regulated) cost.

> I'm guessing that the two of us will disagree violently on many points 
> since
> we are on opposite sides of the LEC spectrum...
>


Not really, I'm just a Unix admin with a grasp of how things work 
around here.  I wanted to speak up simply because I don't think that 
people understand the complexities in the issue, Its a "stick it to the 
man" type of issue, "big business bad" is the gut reaction.
--
Michael Osten
http://www.bleepyou.com/~mosten/pgp.txt