Competition Means Choice
Some of us still remember when a "long distance call" was an
event that inspired family members to hover over the
telephone, waiting turns to speak briefly to a great aunt
or some other relative residing hundreds of miles away in
another state. At 35 cents per minute, a pretty fair premium
in the 1970's, an hour long conversation would rack
up a $21.00 long distance charge from AT&T (an amount
much larger
than an average home's monthly long distance bill today).
Judge Harold Greene, in his 1982 ruling,
broke up the AT&T monopoly, forming the seven "Baby
Bells". This, in turn allowed competitive access providers
like Sprint, MCI and Qwest to enter the marketplace and
drive long distance transport of voice or data services down
to a mere fraction of those rates.
The FCC's Telecommunications Deregulation act of 1996 has
further changed the landscape of the telecommunications
industry. Following the lessons learned from Judge Greens
decision, the purpose of this landmark legislation is clear:
Enable competition. And competition . . . means
choices.
Though passed in 1996, the Telecom
Deregulation Act includes timelines of future events that
are materializing even today. Realizing the importance of
Wireless as a future communications medium, timelines for
both wired and wireless technologies were written into the
Act.
In the wireless industry, competition first took place in
the mid 90's in the form of new spectrum and new carriers in
the marketplace, replacing the old duopoly of the original
"A" and "B" cellular carriers
(in Tallahassee, CellularOne and Centel Cellular) with up to seven competitive
cellular companies .
In the later 90's, the Baby Bells began to see competition
from newly formed CLECs or Competitive Local Exchange
Carriers in the area of local telephone service (in
Tallahassee, KMC Telecom and ITC^Deltacom).
Critical to true competition is "number portability". The reasoning here is that if the local
telephone company has control over a businesses
published telephone number then there really can be no competition,
due to the negative impact of
changing that number. With local number portability, the
ability for a CLEC to "port" that number to their network,
that problem is solved.
Wireless Local Number Portability, one of
the more recent changes indicated by the Telecom Act has
only become available in Tallahassee since May of 2004. The
technical feasibility of WLNP necessitated that it take place
"further down the road" so that all carriers could implement
the necessary network upgrades to enable LNP first, then
WLNP.
