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If the actions of George W. Bush's Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) are any indication, a Bush FCC might give special scrutiny to ILECs who drag their feet opening up their networks to broadband providers.
The new president appointed all three of the current Texas Public Utility Commissioners, who have had ample experience with competitive broadband issues in the Lone Star State.
Chairman Pat Wood III at one point was talked about as a possible FCC chairman, as was commissioner Judy Walsh, who along with Wood worked on the Bush-Cheney energy transition team. Walsh actually announced plans to leave the PUC the day after she said she was taking the transition team job. Brett Perlman, the third commissioner, is considered the broadband expert.
Through a commission spokesman, all three declined to be interviewed for this story.
But a look at the record shows that the Texas PUC has had a number of opportunities to influence provision of broadband services during Bush's recently ended reign as governor. It had to approve initial DSL marketing by Advanced Solutions, Inc., the broadband subsidiary created by San Antonio-based SBC Communications Inc. That approval came in December, 1999, according to SBC spokeswoman Karen Kay Speer. "We had some dialogue with the Texas PUC," she says. "They didn't just rubber-stamp our application."
Speer adds that ASI has just over 500,000 customers in the 13 states SBC serves. She does not know the numbers in Texas, or any other individual state. Even before ASI got approval to operate, the Texas PUC had cracked the knuckles of SBC's local ILEC Southwestern Bell for thwarting efforts by competitive DSL providers Covad Communications and Rhythms Netconnections in getting interconnection for high-speed data services. On Sept. 24, 1999, the PUC ordered SWB to pay $750,000 total to the two companies because of the incumbent's inability to produce documents requested by Covad and Rhythms' Rhythms Links subsidiary.
Rhythms' general counsel Jeffrey Blumenfeld says the PUC action "cleared the way for greater choice and faster deployment of innovative services." The three parties eventually signed an agreement on Jan. 13, 2000, giving the two CLECs access to the Advanced Solutions.
When it came time to "encourage" SBC to open its DSL services to Texas ISPs, the PUC didn't whack SBC with a fine as it had Southwestern Bell. But the commission's verbal persuasion apparently worked wonders. On June 14, 2000, the Texas Internet Service Providers Association (TISPA) and SBC Communications signed what TISPA President David Robertson called a "groundbreaking" agreement.
That deal, which Robinson said followed the implied threat of action by the PUC and the FCC, included DSL capable loop qualification procedures that reduce the manual intervention formerly required to process ISP DSL orders. Other aspects included introduction of new programs designed to streamline the DSL ordering process for ISPs; additional competitive pricing promotions and connectivity options including aggregation of purchase volumes to take advantage of discount pricing.
While Robertson lauded the Texas PUC's role in forcing SBC to open its network to the ISPs, he nonetheless complains that the PUC was too quick to give SBC permission to sell long distance phone service in Texas. The PUC did that on Dec. 16, 1999, after determining that CLECs had 1 million local phone customers in Texas and that Southwestern Bell had met the 14 long-distance "checklist" requirements laid out in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
However, a few months later both the U.S. Justice Department and the FCC asked for further evidence of "open access" beyond what had been deemed satisfactory by the Texas PUC.
One of the three areas Justice and the FCC were concerned about was SBC provision of DSL loops to competitors. Priscilla Hill-Adroin, an SBC senior vice president, argued that CLECs had captured more than 5,000 DSL lines in Texas. That was more than five times the number of DSL lines provided to CLECs in New York at the time the FCC approved Bell Atlantic's long distance application for New York State, she argued.
The FCC finally gave its approval to SBC on June 30, 2000. Texas was the first state for which SBC was cleared for long distance. It was the second ILEC, after Bell Atlantic, to get long distance approval for a state.
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