[VoiceOps] BellSouth vs. AT&T stance on multi-tandem access.

[Jason Vanick]

> Jason Vanick wrote:
> 
> > Yup, you're right, if your usage was greater than ds1 it might be better to have a DEOT...
> > 
> > DEOT tho could be more expensive to outlying areas that you might only have a few users in...
> > so it was sometimes better to just incur the extra usage fees at the access tandem. 
> > Ameritech somtimes forced this issue to, due to 'capacity' on their switches.  Heck, in the
> > mid-late 90's they were just turning down a 1AESS in the north chicago area.  
> 
> Hmm.  Are we talking about inbound or outbound here?  For inbound, there 
> should not be any usage fees for picking up the calls at the tandem. 
> The ILEC is required to drag calls from anywhere in its network to you, 
> and as far as I know there's no additional cost.

you're right I was thinking more outbound.

> It's just that if you get a lot of inbound from one particular 
> end-office, most ICAs allow them to force you to pay extra for DEOT and 
> pick the traffic up yourself straight at the POI.  This was, as you say, 
> implemented mainly for tandem exhaust reasons at the time it was 
> conceived.

Exactly.

> For outbound, of course, various intra-LATA recip. comp. and switched 
> access fees apply.

Yup... tandem termination  was always more pricey than DEOT termination... sometimes by 
as much as 3x.

> > I truly feel sorry for those people.  But it is a way of cutting your teeth.  How many
> > of us wouldn't have learned how things really work on the political/business side if
> > we wouldn't have had to deal with all the RBOC fun.  ;) ... ok, maybe we would all still
> > have hair.
> 
> Well, that's certainly one way to look at it.  Another way to look at it 
> is that local loop deregulation is a train wreck.  I didn't think this 
> until I saw how comparatively smoothly deregulation has been pulled off 
> in some other countries, i.e. in the UK when BT was politely told to 
> divest itself into a telco unit and a loop unit and OpenReach was born.

Yup.  The FCC probably should have stayed out of things much more than they did.
But then they wouldn't have had all those jobs for all the regulation people.
Well, that and the RBOCS really still thought (think?) they were the only game in town.
Interesting culture difference.

-J