0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) (03/11/91)
competition in the U.S., called Alternative Access Carriers. These
are firms that found how shaky the claimed "monopoly" of U.S. local
telephone companies is when it comes to planting fiber optic cable in
the streets of cities.
Beginning from a start in (take a bow, Patrick!) Chicago in
the mid-1980's with the Chicago Fiber Optic company (now the Chicago
operations of Metropolitan Fiber Optics), conservative reporters
estimate that 30 firms are already in operation in cities areound the
U.S.
I think the number is much larger. I base this on knowing that
Chicago has at least three firms, MFO, Diginet (which also reaches
from Chicago to Milwaukee) and Teleport, New York has at least two,
(MFO and Teleport), and Washington DC has at least two (MFO and
Institutional Communications Corp. In lesser-publicized markets, a
Florida firm called Intermedia has operations in Tampa, Clearwater,
St. Petersburg, Orlanda and a plan for Jacksonville. There are even
two firms in Englewood, CO, a suburb of Denver. Cable TV companies
are wakening to the potential, so Jones Cablevision has obtained hte
needed permits for Gwinnet County, a northeastern suburb of Atlanta,
as well as being involved in municipal plans in central Denver, while
TCI (headquartered in Denver) is plowing in Seattle, to compete with
Electric Lightwave Company, which is already operating in Portland.
How can these firms get in operation so easily and rapidly?
As was done by Cable & Wirless' Mercury Communications in England,
people who understand the "law of the city street" know there are
miles and miles of easy rights-of-way. In England, CandW used
abandoned Victorian-era steam pipes for fiber conduits. In Chicago,
MFS used the abandoned railway tunnels of Chicago Merchants Railway,
curiously enough built at the turn of this century for placement of
telephone lines to compete with Illinois Bell. In one of the many acts
that caused the first Federal antritrust suits against Bell, the
Western Electric Company bought Chicago Merchants Railway and operated
it for 60 years to prevent use of the tunnels by non-Bell competitors.
Apparently AT&T forgot why WECo owned the railway by the mid-1960's,
so the tunnels were there for MFS to compete with Illinois Bell.
In more cities than they have yet discovered, MCI has an
underground bonanza in conduits of the Western Union Telegraph Company
that MCI purchased more than a year ago. I even heard of wooden
conduits of WUTCo found while digging up streets in Oklahoma City last
year. Another common reusable conduit is abandoned city gas mains,
which Williams Telecommunications has been known to buy up in major
cities, just to hold onto while using only a small portion for their
own entry into the city.
Obviously, a lot of people in a lot of places see a potential
in providing fiber bypass of the local telephone companies. The name
"Alternative Access Carrier," or AAC has emerged from the former term
Metropolitan Area Network or MAN that was descriptive first of cable
TV company "I-nets," the second cable supposedly intended for lcoal
bypass then later fiber in the streets. The first market for these
AAC operations was (and is) the long-distance companies who buy bulk
from AACs to interconnect with each other and even cross metropolitan
areas. (This is one of the better-kept secrets of modern fiber common
carriage.) AT&T has evolved the term, "Alternate Access Vendor," or
AAV just to add another acronym to the telecom heap, and now offers
interconnection to its intercity plant via AAC facilities in cities
where AT&T has finalized contracts for public resale. (Funny, AT&T
doesn't seem to need these "contracts" until some end use comes along
and demands interconnection ... they buy the stuff for their own
purposes without them.)
This post is both a report and an inquiry. There as yet seems
to be no central clearinghouse for information about activities in the
AAC arena, and such publicity as exists is spotty, for the most part
being confused local business press reports.
I hope the Digest might be an early-days central information
point about AAC services availability.