Rate Hikes Coming

AT&T’s special access lines are set for price hikes. One Coalition is fighting it. Read more here.

The merger conditions have expired and most special access circuit types (anything bought out of the tariff or pricing guides as a transport of T1 or greater is Special Access).

Fiber bigots, like Rusin and inphotonicsresearch.com, think that the copper plant is being over-utilized. HUH?? Bonding copper just isn't going to cut it, they say. It is a band-aid at best. And folks need to start building out their own fiber.

If that was so easy, guys, then wouldn't just about every single MTU of a reasonable size have fiber?

For example, AFS has 1200 route miles of fiber, that connects 627 buildings, mostly wholesale and larger enterprise sites, according to Rob Powell. That's one building for every 2 miles of fiber, but I will bet that many of those buildings already had fiber, like 56 Marietta, 55 and other Atlanta lit buildings. It's not like they lit up 600 unlit buildings. Or that they lit up every building they passed either, which is kind of what you are asking the copper guys to do -- and to do it for a T1 or 2.

Or should the only CLEC model be AFS or Zayo? Whereby you only have customers that want 50MB or more bandwidth, so that you can justify a build-out of fiber for a 4 year contract. That would leave 95% of the market to the ILEC and maybe 80% to the MSO. There would be even less semblance of competition than there is now.