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4. Present a comprehensive set of facts regarding the impacts and opportunities a strong competitive telecommunications infrastructure offers to the U.S. and how relevant COMPTEL and its members are to that vision of a competitive and capable infrastructure.

Beyond Regulation: Service Delivery

The second theme was a sharp dichotomy in the view of the market by the vendors. Traditionalists continue to capitalize on the overwhelming demand for “Basic T-1 replacement with access lines carrying both IP data & voice” that is the bread and butter of the CLECs revenues. The futurists argued optimistically that CLECs were “finally recognizing that you need to sell advanced services to survive in this competitive environment.”

understanding that the ubiquity of IP, the “cloud,” means that services can be virtually anywhere; so at this year’s COMPTEL show, we saw much more interest in hosting services and particularly our hosted disaster recovery systems.” David Mackereth of Homisco, Inc. Both viewpoints were emphatic. Too bad there was no venue that allowed them to debate this in public – but we expect both camps are correct. Successful CLECs are successful because they offer those bread and butter services at competitive prices. But that telecom market is under severe pressure and the CLEC community will need to adapt

On the traditional side was Martin Taylor of MetaSwitch: “Every time we get ‘visionary’ with voice, our customers drag us back down to earth…” He said “T-1 replacement service” still involves swapping the existing legacy voice switches with newer class 4/5 VoIP switches and IP IAD’s – as long as they provide complete parity with existing TDM voice. In effect, this is a modern SIP service replacement for providing traditional services at lower cost. Taylor admits that this is what the end clients want; most of the SMB market finds it “too complicated to learn a new system,” and it certainly isn’t a core competency that they should have to acquire.

Nevertheless, the vendors offering advanced or enhanced services were seeing some strong, new interest in their products.

to thrive in this changing market. Ron Beaumont, who led MFS, UUnet, and MCI Worldcom (after Bernie’s fall), was one of the trio speaking in the CEO forum. He noted that the principal management focus for COMPTEL companies today should be “flexibility”. He believes the most strategic response to Forbearance is “gaming the process” with development of alternative new services by the CLEC ecosystem.

There were some few voices espousing WiMAX as the alternative future in a panel which, tellingly, had no WIMAX providers present. (The Sprint representative was scheduled to provide some insights into the viability of this technology but was unfortunately one of the few committed speakers who at the last minute had to cancel.)