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Telcos Learn to Share Net Access

Nudged by the FCC, US West lets Covad put DSL on existing phone lines.

By Cameron Crouch, PCWorld   

Not necessarily. This week, for the first time, some customers will begin getting DSL services on their existing phone lines from other suppliers--courtesy a little government pressure.

The Federal Communications Commission ruled last November that telcos such as US West and Bell Atlantic must share DSL access with competitive local exchange carriers such as Covad Communications, which offers DSL services through Internet service providers. The first instance of line sharing takes place this week at a customer site in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

"The essential theory [behind the line-sharing ruling] is parity," says Jason Oxman, Covad's senior government affairs counsel. "We want the ability to provide the data and voice over the same loop" as the carriers.

Line sharing drops costs significantly for broadband providers like Covad, and lets it connect customers faster. Previously, Covad had to pay the local phone company to deploy a second loop for DSL access, an expensive and time-consuming process.

Why Minnesota?

Minnesota is an early advocate of line sharing, and set a time line for the service even before the FCC's ruling, according to Covad representatives.

US West and Covad are deploying line sharing first in Minnesota, then throughout the entire US West region. The telco's territory stretches to the Pacific Northwest and to the Southwestern states.

Covad has similar plans with Bell Atlantic in New York, and plans to spread to the entire Bell Atlantic region by June.

The result should be a boom in residential DSL deployment.

Bell companies have been reluctant to offer DSL or let others use their phone lines to do so because they didn't want to cannibalize their own ISDN or T1 services, Oxman says. Even when it arrives, installing DSL often takes weeks and multiple appointments with the phone company.

DSL Power Spreads

Covad partners with several hundred ISPs to market its DSL access. In addition to the installation fee, which varies with the ISP, prices range from $59 to $69 monthly for 384-kilobits-per-second downloads (128-kbps uploads). The service costs between $79 and $99 monthly for 768-kbps downloads (384-kbps uploads).

Company representatives won't promise that line sharing will make DSL cheaper, but the telcos' cooperation should make it more widely available.

It used to take about a month to get DSL in Minnesota, Oxman says. "We're looking to tell customers to expect service deployment in about five days," he says. Of course, that still relies on a hand from the Bell companies.