[VoiceOps] Future of the Traditional PSTN vs VOIP and VoLTE

[Alex Balashov]

On 12/06/2015 11:31 PM, Mary Lou Carey wrote:

> NC/NCI information is company specific so it's actually the ILEC that
> documents that information......you just have to know where to go to
> look for it!

Technically, ILECs publish a lot of stuff publicly, to comply with the 
letter of regulations requiring them to do so. However, most of it is 
not digestible or usable to those who work outside the world of ILEC 
provisioning, so it has to be processed into commercial databases like 
the LERG and LCADS. The same mafia then charges for access to these, for 
reasons motivated by profit and creating systemic barriers to entry for 
small competitors.

If anyone balks at the seemingly surreal cocktail of having to sell 
one's kidney for access to notionally public information, the ILECs can 
always say: "You can download the 90 page local tariff yourself right 
there from our web site, you just have to know where to look! The 
commercial databases are just adding value by composing it into readily 
machine-processable form!"

This is one of the most common cop-outs of New Gilded Age sociopaths; 
"we're complying with the letter of the law, and we reserve the right to 
charge a reasonable fee for putting the information into a convenient 
form for you..." Except, there wouldn't be a need to take 90 pages of 
arcane prose and turn it into a few table rows of values if they did not 
themselves dictate the rules; there is no "value add" in the LERG 
because it is a response to a artificial contrivance, a purely invented 
problem of the ILECs' own deliberate making. It exploits information 
asymmetries and differences of power between big and small actors in the 
same way as pseudoscientific chemistry gibberish on early 20th century 
quack remedies, or the fine print on 264-page subprime mortgage issuance 
binders.

I think that's really the essence of Erik's grievance, and it's a valid 
one. Sure, you can participate in the PSTN*.

* Expensive semi-proprietary decoder ring and beaucoup bucks required.

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC
303 Perimeter Center North, Suite 300
Atlanta, GA 30346
United States

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