Despite the
RBOC's effort to defend its choices, the view that politics had unduly influenced the selection of cities for Reserve Banks has remained widely held ever since.
While the contentious UNE debates were under way, regulators addressed the Act's mandate that interconnection agreements must include "reciprocal compensation for the transport and termination of traffic." One
RBOC economist suggested that "If we pay the 1 cent and they pay us 3 cents; that is 'reciprocal.'" The FCC did not agree and changed "reciprocal" to "reciprocal and symmetric" in its Order implementing the Act.
Although the unit was trying to attract new customers, the AT&T services unit and the
RBOCs continued to be the dominant customers.
Chapter 271 of the Federal Telecommunications Act states that the FCC shall not permit
RBOCs to provide inter-LATA services until it concludes that an
RBOC has irrevocably opened up its market to competition.
The plaintiffs, along with Qwest's CEO, believed that competing in another region would have been profitable for an
RBOC.
On the
RBOC side, both SBC and BellSouth have satellite video offerings, SBC with DISH Network and BellSouth with DirecTV.
The effect of
RBOC entry into long-distance on CLEC entry into local telephony is evaluated using two models.
It may well be in an
RBOC's interest to move users from a dial-up use on an additional line to a DSL line from which a higher-profit might be earned.
The Lucent-recommended LTS replacement product is the DigiTest System, approved for use in each
RBOC and the only test system fully backward compatible with the LoopCare Test OSS, already widely in use in all of the
RBOCs.
Somera Communications (Nasdaq:SMRA), Santa Barbara, Calif., a leading global provider of telecom equipment deployment services, has announced that the company has launched a program to provide turnkey wireless backhaul solutions to national wireless and Regional Bell Operating Company (
RBOC) communities.
Its electronic-warfare suite consists of the Indra (Madrid, Spain) Aldebaran combined electronic-support-measures and countermeasures suite, four Sippican (Marion, MA) Mk 36 Super
RBOC decoy launchers, and the Aerojet Electrosystems (Azusa, CA) AN/SLQ-25 Nixie acoustic-countermeasures system.
The collapse of telecom investment, in turn, was triggered by the decimation of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) in the hands of the
RBOCs and their congressional allies--not by a preceding alleged "overinvestment." The Telecoms Act of 1996 was intended to stimulate competition against the
RBOC monopolies, but instead provided such minimal penalties that it practically invited the
RBOCs to systematically violate the law and kill the competition.