Let's be fair. (was Re: Bay Area home internet

Thu Aug 17 17:21:14 PDT 2006

Quoting Bill Ward (bill at wards.net):

> I don't know what ILEC is.  I am not in the ISP industry so I don't
> know the jargon.

Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incumbent_local_exchange_carrier
Roughly speaking:  the Baby Bells + GTE, i.e., the companies that own
the telco central office a couple of miles from people's houses plus the
cabling underneath or over street _to_ their houses (those facilities
being termed the "local loop").

The entity formerly known as SBC is an ILEC.

CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) are companies like the
worthy Mr. Doty's Sonic.net and my personal favourite Mike Durkin's 
Raw Bandwidth Communications, who are permitted by the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 to interconnect their equipment such as
their _own_ DSLAMs (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer -- see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSLAM) at the telco/ILEC central offices
and offer competing services over the shared local loop.

> The only complaint I raised was price and I know there's not a lot
> resellers can do to compete with the guys they're reselling.

Again, these are _not_ resellers you've been (and I've been) discussing.

They offer completely independent (and invariably much better)
equipment, IP provisioning / routing, and other aspects of service,
sharing _only_ the ILEC local loop.

Saying that Sonic.net (et alii) is just a reseller is very inaccurate
and sells them quite a bit short.  I'm sure you did not intend it as
such.