Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Fri Jul 11 17:11:31 UTC 2014

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> Well... if you make a phone call to a rural area, or a 3rd world country,
> with a horrible system, is it your telco's responsibility to go out there
> and fix it?

Hi Miles,

The telephone companies offer a remarkably apt case study in how NOT
to do traffic hand off.

With the advent of CLECs, the incumbent phone companies fought tooth
and nail against simple settlement-free interconnection. They were
deathly afraid of CLECs wiring up office buildings at a discount and
then stranding the ILECs with the more expensive residential and small
users. They convinced the FCC to dictate an originator-pays strategy
where both companies must assure sufficient capacity between their
systems and then the originating system pays the receiving system a
couple pennies a minute. So sure, wire up all those office buildings.
They're going to mainly call our customers and we'll collect the money
from you instead.

As you can imagine, hilarity ensued: some CLECs actually paid Internet
Service Providers to accept PRIs because the PRIs only ever received
calls and they tended to be heavily used 24 hours a day. The CLECs got
their entire revenue from per-minute charges the ILECs had insisted
the FCC require.

Modern arrangements between CLECs and ILECs are somewhat less insane.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004