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Storming the Castle

By David Willis A thousand years ago, feudalism dominated Europe. Regional aristocrats claimed ownership of all valuable assets and forced their subjects to patronize their local monopolies. If you needed wood, grain or land, you dealt exclusively with your local lord, who controlled supply and set prices. Although this system sounds barbaric, it was better than what preceded it: the massive, centralized government of the Roman Empire. It was simply more effective to govern locally.

We can draw a few parallels to the state of telecommunications in the United States: The major assets are held by local monopolies, working through the state public utility commissions to set rates and services. While localization may be more effective than the massive AT&T monopoly that dominated most of the 20th century, it still leaves most customers locked int o a single provider for services in a given region.

This medieval local telecommunications structure serves regulatory bodies and regional providers, but adds no value to managers trying to knit a comprehensive network. We don't need three service provider contracts to ship a box from New York to Los Angeles, so why do we accept this setup in our networks? The answer is because we have no choice. But that is changing. Competition in the local loop actually began in the mid-1980s, well before the Telecommunications Act of 1996. At that time, competitive access providers (CAPs) supplied dedicated services by installing fiber optic facilities with route redundancy. CAPs connected locations in metropolitan areas with one another or with the interexchange carriers (IXCs) that provided long-haul private lines and long-distance services . CAPs used the benefits brought by fiber's capacity and reliability to beat the incumbent's pr edominantly copper-served offerings. Once they had established a fiber foothold, CAPs could move faster than the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC), offering quick installation and repair times, as well as progressive new data services.

For example, CAPs introduced LAN interconnection services over the native interfaces found on a customer's equipment. With the rest of the world shoving packets across router serial ports and High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) links, these services provide actual Ethernet, FDDI or Token-Ring ports to the subscriber. Offered by WorldCom (through the former MFS Communications Co., with which WorldCom merged) as Highspeed LAN Interconnect (HLI) and by Teleport Communications Group as OmniLAN Services, these services not only give customers more bandwidth with lower latency but let the customer enjoy a reduction in equipment costs. Simply plug the WAN connector into your LAN hub or router port, and you're up. These services also conveniently fill the wide price and perfo rmance gap between the T1 and T3 services offered by the ILECs.

What else does this new breed of exchange carrier offer? For starters, a single point of contact for problem resolution. These carriers take responsibility for outages or performance degradations, regardless of whether they're in the local or long-haul portions of the network. Compare this approach to that of the frame relay service providers, which are willing to give performance guarantees only across their own backbones.