FCC kills off telco linesharing

[Lhadatt]

Crap crap crap.

How stupid can these people be?

Essentially, now the FCC requires companies to provide voice telephony services before they can take advantage of line-sharing policies. In effect, the FCC is saying "You have to have the lines to offer voice before we'll let you line-share with the Baby Bells in order to get lines to offer DSL." Now, one would think the DSL providers could just offer Voice-over-IP (VoIP), but FCC regulations don't count this as a voice service yet.

In short, this is re-creating a Baby Bell monopoly on DSL services.

Note that this happened even with the dissent of FCC Chairman Powell.

Go tell your representatives that the FCC is a bunch of idiots.

Quoth Slashdot:
FCC Abandons Linesharing, Kills DSL Competition
Posted by timothy on Thursday February 20, @02:10PM
from the where-are-my-leo-sats dept.
raygundan writes "According to Reuters, the FCC today decided to greatly curtail the laws that force incumbent phone companies to share their lines with their competition at cost. This does not bode well for companies like Covad Communications who provide DSL using phone lines to bridge their data networks over the "last mile" to customers. The new rules do force line sharing as long as companies are willing to offer voice service, but this essentially states that if you are not already a phone company, you cannot offer DSL. The existing rules will be phased out over three years. There is still some hope, however, that a federal court might strike down the FCC ruling. Oddly, the news agencies seem to be reporting this as a minor change to the rules, rather than an end to all non-ILEC competition in DSL." The FCC's front page has links (luckily PDFs as well as Microsoft Word files) about the decision, including statements from each of the commissioners.

Source: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/02/20....shtml?tid=103

[Schlep]

Doesn't much matter. 90% of CLECs are out of business anyway, and the other 10% are either on their way out or are being slipped money by Bells.

[Lhadatt]

It still sucks.

[Jeremy]

Well, that isn't going to help lower DSL prices any faster. That sucks.

[Shine]

Guess that might put an end to nTelos DSL service down here, which means no DSL at all. FCC is a stupid beauracrecy that has yet to evolve with the times anyhow I'd say to hell with them. I can think of a whole slew of FCC regulations that are either stupid, out of date or targeted to one specific business (or type there of) or in favor of annother.

[Ragnarok the Red]

All I can say is thank God for cable internet

[Shine]

Yeah but without the DSL competition I'm about to lose all my bandwidth. Damn FCC.

[Ragnarok the Red]

Originally posted by ShineAqua
Yeah but without the DSL competition I'm about to lose all my bandwidth. Damn FCC.

D'OH!

Forgot where everyone's gonna flock to now

[jiji]

Wonderful. More pandering to giant corporations courtesy of the FCC. In five or ten years' time, we'll be back to having a monopoly-run telecom industry, not to mention a monopoly-run radio industry (Hello, Clear Channel!). Competition? Bah, who needs it?!