Originally published in issue 3, 2024 of the Retiree Guardian

By Clyde Just

In the last issue, I wrote an article that explained the key issues that impacted the eight companies that were created by the break-up of the Bell System. During this time frame U S West had two major “downsizing” operations. The first one was in 1986 (the 3 + 3 offer) and the much larger one in 1990 (the 5 + 5 offer). The employees who took one of these two offers had a least a few years of experience in a divestiture mode of operation. However, none of them experienced what may have been a much larger change to the companies affected by divestiture. It has been 28 years since Congress passed a bill called the “Telecommunications Act of 1996”.

In this article I will try to explain some of the major impacts that were created from this act. The Act was passed on 1/3/1996 and signed into law by President Clinton on 2/8/1996. The act was 800 pages and it provided the key ingredients to foster competition among companies willing to provide multiple communications services. It also assigned to the Federal Communications Commission the task of writing the more detailed rules and regulations and it had to be completed by 8/2/1996, a time frame of six months. Low and behold, these rules also contained 800 pages.  

It was at this time that U S West, as well the other telephone companies, needed to implement the rules of these two documents. It was also the time that I moved to a new assignment from operations to implementation of this law. I was one of many people in this new organization and I was assigned to assist in the implementation for Iowa and Nebraska. The other 12 states were covered by six other managers like me. Prior to this law the Baby Bells were primarily in the “retail” world selling telephone service to “end users”. The first real change that resulted was that they would now become a “wholesaler” as explained in more detail in the following paragraphs.

The key concept of this law was to create new rules of “interconnection” between all of the various existing telephone companies as well as all of the “new telephone” companies”. The telecommunication companies that had been providing telephone service were called ILEC’s (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) while all new telephone companies were called CLEC’s (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers). For this discussion I will use USW as the ILEC and CLEC for all of the competitors. Let the party get started.

One of the key concepts of the new rules of “interconnection” was the requirement that USW had to “unbundle” our local loops. Let me try to explain what this required. I will try to keep it as simple as I can. USW had “central offices” that contained all of the switching equipment needed to connect one customer line with another customer line. Outside of the central office were all of the outside plant cables and wires that carried the dial tone from the central office to the customer’s premise. Inside the central office was a connection point called the MDF (Main Distribution Frame) where on one side was terminations from the switching equipment and the other side had the terminations of the outside plant cable pairs. Central office technicians would then run a jumper that would connect these two terminations and PRESTO, like magic, a customer’s phone now had USW dial tone and the customer could make calls.

Now let’s look at the CLEC’s. Most all of the CLEC’s had the ability to build a central office. However, trying to build an outside plant network was simply not conceivable. So what was USW required to do? We had to “unbundle” their loops at the MDF. How did we do this? The first concept was “collocation”. For the first time USW was required to open our central office space and allow a CLEC to rent space in our building. At first, this space was a 10’ by 10’ cage built by USW at a cost to the CLEC. The next step was to allow a CLEC to build a connection between their central office and the cage by bringing their fiber cable to our central office. USW would then pull the CLEC fiber cable from our manhole by our office to the CLEC cage and leave a coil of the fiber in the cage.

In a similar manner, we would place cables from our MDF to the CLEC cage. The CLEC would tell us how many terminations they wanted to have placed on the MDF. Again, we would terminate these cables on the MDF and bring the cables to the cage and leave enough of a coil to meet the CLEC’s needs. Finally, we would bring power cables from our power plant to the ILEC’s cage.

What is now the end result of “unbundling the ILEC’s cables”? The CLEC can now sell their dial tone to an end user customer. Their dial tone will run from their central office to our central office and into the cage and their dial tone will then run to our MDF and use our outside plant to get to the end user.

As you can see from the above, U S West’s retail department would continue selling to end users while U S West’s new wholesale department would sell interconnection to the ILEC’s.  As an example, consider your own home telephone service that you used for many years. USW’s service reps would sell you the phone service you ordered and USW’s technicians would complete the install. If you ever had trouble with your service you would call USW’s repair service. Now let’s say that you decided to buy telephone service from an ILEC. You would contact the ILEC business office to order your service. The ILEC would then contact USW’s wholesale group to order an unbundled loop from their collocation to the end user’s address. The ILEC would then complete the installation and you would now be receiving ILEC’s dial tone. Your telephone number would not be changed. Again, by the law, this was one of the rules. Now let’s assume you had to call the ILEC with a trouble report. The ILEC would troubleshoot the line and if the problem was in the “unbundled” portion of the outside plant the ILEC would call USW to have them repair the cable pair. In other words, the end user is a customer of the ILEC while the ILEC is a customer of USW. When a USW tech in the outside plant world received a trouble ticket they had to know if our customer was the end user or the ILEC.

The next paragraphs will discuss several examples of what occurred in the states that I covered. As I mentioned above, I started with Iowa and Nebraska and later I had all of NWB plus Arizona and New Mexico.  Because the CLEC had access to their rented cage, they had to be given access cards to allow them to get to their cage. They would be given directions on the most direct route to be used and they would also be told that they do not have access to any other space in our central office.

If you have had any experience with our central office technicians you would know how this new world of interconnection was accepted by them. To all central office technicians their space was considered in almost sacred terms. Even fellow employees, like the outside plant technicians who had to work inside the central office, were grudgingly allowed in but they better not come in with muddy shoes. Now we also have a myriad of CLEC employees in our central offices.

Between 1996 and 2005 we had many CLEC’s come in to our central offices. Some of them were successful and some of them did not get enough customers and they went out of business. Some CLEC’s have now built their own outside plant networks, in some locations that they select to be providing service, so their needs for unbundled loops has most likely decreased. Since I retired in 2010 I have no knowledge of if or how the above processes are still in use.

While we started collocation with the 10’ by 10’ size we also had cages sized at 10’ by 20’ and 10’ by 30’. At the same time that some CLEC’s wanted these larger sized cages we also had other CLEC’s who wanted smaller spaces. We then came up with a “cageless” collocation option. This option was generally four equipment bays as a minimum size.

Our Real Estate personnel tried to have all collocations in a common location in our offices that were totally separated from the spaces where we had our equipment located. However, sometimes due to space limitations, you might find a CLEC cageless collocation located in the same lineup as our equipment. Again, remember that USW had to meet the requests of the CLEC’s.

During the time frame of 1996 thru 2010 I dealt with about two dozen different CLEC’s. One of these was a CLEC whose home office was in Nashville, TN. I met with them to explain the details of how the process worked. This company placed orders for cageless collocations in 34 different central offices in the state of Iowa. Their business plan was to build these with the intent to then resell them to other ILEC’s. As it turned out, these 34 collocations never had any equipment installed and this CLEC never sold any of them.

In a city like Omaha, where we have 11 different central offices, if the ILEC wanted access to the entire city they would have to order 11 separate collocations. However, if they only wanted to reach selected areas of the city they could pick and choose where they wanted to build collocations. At one point in time we had about a dozen different ILEC’s located in one or more central offices in Omaha.

Some of you may have had personal experiences with CLEC’s while others of you may never have been involved. My only purpose of this article is to share with you how the 1996 Act impacted USW, as well as the other Baby Bells, in ways that could never have been imagined when we were a regulated monopoly.

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