[188934] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: phone fun,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (RT Parrish)
Mon Apr 25 00:35:47 2016
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: RT Parrish <routetarget@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <5717B615.5090707@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2016 20:33:17 -0500
To: Dan Lacey <daniel.p.lacey@gmail.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Dan,
I think that you mean that AT&T is the 1-800 pound gorilla. I know engineer=
s at AT&T that are bitter about that whole arrangement this many years on.
I miss the glory days of everyone and their uncle spinning up a CLEC in the m=
id-90's. It made the ordering process complicated, especially if you were lo=
oking for local loop diversity and had to dig into which ILEC circuit things=
wee riding. Of course we were still doing lots of ISDN and the introduction=
of DSL was making life interesting for the smaller regional ISPs as well.
Cheers,
RT
Sent from my PINE emulated client
> On Apr 20, 2016, at 12:02 PM, Dan Lacey <daniel.p.lacey@gmail.com> wrote:
>=20
> Great explanation!
>=20
> Remember that LECs (Local Exchange Carrier, CenturyLink, Verizon, etc.) ty=
pically get to decide how this all works...
> ATT is still an 800 pound gorilla and a couple years ago stopped ALL payme=
nts to CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, buy wholesale from LECs), t=
ook them all to court (which for a CLEC, it is almost impossible to find a g=
ood lawyer not on retainer to a LEC) and basically just told everyone what t=
hey would pay...
>=20
> Since all the LECs started offering unlimited long distance, they could no=
t afford the termination fees.
> So... They changed them!!!
>=20
> Telco is very different from data, not in the physical aspects, but in the=
business and political areas.
>=20
> On 4/20/16 9:20 AM, John Levine wrote:
>>>> For the most part, =E2=80=9Clong distance=E2=80=9D calls within the US a=
re a thing of the
>>>> past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
>>>> local calling area
>>> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
>>> other carriers for "free"
>> No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap. It's equally cheap whether=
>> the framing is ATM or IP.
>>=20
>>> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
>>> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
>>> retail level ?
>> Some of each. Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low
>> rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep
>> with no settlements at all.
>>=20
>> The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the
>> Internet. Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and
>> settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving
>> money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each
>> carrier come out right.
>>=20
>> Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that
>> traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other
>> way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos
>> were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the
>> interconnecting trunks. One of Verizon's predecessors famously
>> derided "bilk and keep."
>>=20
>> Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a
>> passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and
>> CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money
>> from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems. So the
>> Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a
>> law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be
>> snuffed out as fast as possible.
>>=20
>> These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements,
>> and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed
>> costs of the links and equipment. The main place where you see
>> settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per
>> minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them. Then some greedy little
>> telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ...
>>=20
>> R's,
>> John
>=20
