Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 6

	This Month's Issue:
	The Shifting Market

The major event for Competitive Service Providers - COMPTEL Plus

By Barbara Lancaster and Wedge Greene

The COMPTEL team put together an excellent conference. The Gaylord Texan hotel and conference center was a great choice: minutes away from the DFW airport and a world away from ordinary sterile concrete boxy conference centers. From the very well attended 007-themed opening night cocktail reception through to the wrap up, the show was well organized, sessions started and ended on time, and with very few exceptions, all of the speakers turned up as promised. The presentations were well thought through, on the topic described in the show brochure, and the panels were lively and informative.

Not only that, but reading the name tags showed that overwhelmingly attendees were from Service Providers…! Wow – a vendor’s dream conference: Qwest, AT&T Wholesale, Global Crossing, TelePacific, XO, Mcleod, DeltaComm, NTI, NTT America, 360 Networks, three sixty communications, and more.

What could be the catch? Each was there more in their capacity as a vendor rather than a buyer. This gathering is all about service providers selling to service providers. The exhibition floor also had dozens of hardware and software vendors. The vendors we spoke with indicated that they had hoped for more visitors to their stands, but nevertheless, each came away with a few solid prospects, and each found it a great venue to connect with their current customer base, too.

The show was a good opportunity to find out what kind of business issues, challenges, and opportunities are keeping COMPTEL members awake at night. Would it be Next Generation Networks and the new services they could enable? Would it be how to dramatically slash the Integration Tax? Perhaps it would be about streamlining the process of buying and selling the bandwidth that enables each of them to expand their geographical footprints?

Each of these themes was touched on, and many of the vendors on the show floor had potential solutions to discuss, but the big topic was how to compete in an era of regulatory uncertainty. There was a strong, unified voice of dissatisfaction with FCC and its perceived agenda to undermine the Telecom Act of 1996. Dissatisfaction is an understatement - there was downright anger. One executive even wished for the “good-old days when MCI led the fight for alternative carriers.” [This nostalgia for MCI in the hero company role model felt rather like stepping through the Looking Glass into Wonderland. Of course he was pining for the trail blazing MCI, before its fall from grace after the merger and assimilation into WorldCom.]

The dissatisfaction was focused on two specific trends: worry and anger over the lack of guaranteed access to next generation

...Reading the name tags showed that, overwhelmingly, attendees were from Service Providers. Wow! - a vendor's dream conference... What could be the catch?

fiber/IP networks, and hostility toward the current legal decisions on Forbearance – which have the potential to erode the competitive gains the CLECs have struggled to achieve in the last 2 decades. From the CLEC perspective, Forbearance foreshadows the elimination of competition in American communications markets.

As most of you know, the “bigs” (as newly hired lobbyist Eddie Fritts likes to call them) have a few trump cards in hand right now. The COMPTEL members are working hard to establish their own voice more clearly with the FCC and with Congress, with a coherent program endorsed by the CEO Forum and the membership at large.

Here’s a quick summary of the Regulatory issues raised at the show:

Unbundled Network Elements: The FCC has apparently agreed with the LECs that Unbundled Network Elements are not part of a truly competitive infrastructure. In addition to agreeing that LEC fiber-based networks need not be opened up to mandatory access by competitors, the FCC’s recent handling of several Forbearance petitions (requests to waive the Section 251 and 271 unbundling requirements) are causing grave concerns amongst the COMPTEL members.
Forbearance itself: The LECs are moving this ball ahead on several fronts. By targeting specific network element types and specific Wire Centers, the LECs have won decisions that support their assertion that Cable Companies have made sufficient gains in subscribers to local access services to demonstrate that competitors no longer need the protection envisioned by Sections 251 and 271.

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