Pre-show Guide to INCOMPAS 2018

Attendees also have the opportunity to stay current on the latest trends and learn about issues impacting their business through the show’s educational sessions. This fall the agenda will focus on the state of competition, featuring sessions including:

• Keynote address by Makan Delrahim, Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division for U.S. Department of Justice
• On the Front Lines of Regulatory Change, a half-day policy workshop
• A View from the C-Suite, featuring top executives from FirstLight Fiber, Logix Fiber Networks and more

Other sessions include:

• Fiber First—The Foundation for 5G Network
• Negotiating for Success,  hosted by the Alliance of Channel Women
• Optimizing Your Network Investment, an exclusive C-suite networking breakfast program
• USTelecom Forbearance Petition Workshop, open to INCOMPAS service provider members and invited guests only

The INCOMPAS Show isn’t all business, however. Each day features numerous networking opportunities—from free breakfast and lunch in the exhibit hall to the INCOMPAS Bar, where attendees can fuel up with coffee or grab a drink with colleagues, to networking receptions and parties that cap off each day, enabling attendees to catch up with old friends as well as make new ones.

Advocacy Supports Business Opportunities

As a complement to its shows, INCOMPAS’s advocacy work is equally as critical to helping communications companies maintain and grow their businesses. Through our advocacy work, INCOMPAS seeks to preserve, promote and expand competition to spur continued innovation and expand customer choice.

Representing competitive broadband companies that are building networks of the future, as well as the companies that offer services over those networks, INCOMPAS advocates for pro-competition and pro-innovation policies in Congress, at the White House, in the courts and at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). For most Americans, broadband competition can’t come soon enough, as they have limited choice at home. But INCOMPAS’ members are the ones working to reach customers with future-proof, high-speed networks. Recognizing that it’s expensive and time-consuming to build such networks, the FCC has been taking steps to speed broadband deployment.

In August, at the urging of INCOMPAS and its fiber providers, the FCC voted to pass the “One-Touch, Make Ready” Order, which will streamline the pole attachment process so that fiber providers can deploy their new networks more quickly. After decades of infrastructure roadblocks and gatekeeper stalling, this progress is a great step forward for our nation’s deployment agenda, including the next generation of 5G mobile networks that will be reliant upon fiber.

Also in August, INCOMPAS filed an opposition at the FCC, urging the Commission to reject a USTelecom Forbearance Petition that seeks to stop broadband competition in its tracks. If granted, the petition would allow incumbent providers to escape their 1996 Telecom Act obligations, which require them to provide wholesale access to unbundled network elements (UNEs) and certain services. These methods of wholesale access are critical to providing a means of competitive entry that spurs fiber builds and innovation, and serve as vital bridges connecting customers to broadband competition. If the petition is granted, residential and business customers who have chosen a smaller, local service provider—whether because of faster speeds, lower prices, or superior service—could face massive broadband price hikes and be stuck with no choice.

INCOMPAS has mobilized the competitive broadband industry to defend competition, and several dozen companies and organizations weighed in against the petition. As part of its opposition filing, INCOMPAS submitted several economic studies demonstrating that local, competitive providers are deploying more fiber than the incumbent; that UNEs enable and incent fiber deployment; and that competitors are offering faster speeds and lower prices than incumbents.

Without competition from new fiber builders, the incumbents have no incentive to upgrade their networks or lower prices. That is why the bridge to broadband is so critical to our national deployment agenda—and why INCOMPAS will continue to fight until the FCC rejects USTelecom’s competition-killing petition.

There will be plenty of other items on Washington’s agenda for the remainder of this year—and into 2019—that will help achieve our ultimate goal of promoting competition and innovation across all networks. Policies that speed deployment without sacrificing competition are the key to long-term investment in the networks of the future.

For more information about how your company can get involved, from networking at The INCOMPAS Show or throughout the year with other members to supporting INCOMPAS public policy advocacy efforts, visit www.incompas.org or email info@incompas.org.