🚀 go-pugleaf

smr <me@shawnritchie.com> wrote:
> On 5/29/2013 10:39 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> 
>> I have no idea what makes bandwidth.com a CLEC either. As far as I know,
>> they aren't a Google subsidiary. They sure as hell own no switches. I believe
>> their business model is making available phone numbers in any rate center
>> (or as many as possible) that many VoIP would assign to their customers.
>> Despite their name, they undoubtably buy the bandwidth to the equipment
>> cabinent in the central office serving the rate center from Global Crossing
>> or one of the others, and don't provide it themselves. Their main business
>> seems to be virtual PBXs for medium-sized businesses and some large ones.
>>
>> I guess operating a switch isn't a prerequisite for being a CLEC.
> 
> The process of becoming a CLEC these days is basically "will you sign an 
> interconnection agreement with AT&T on their terms? Yeah, you will? 
> Congrats, you're a CLEC".
> 
> It was a MUCH bigger pain in the ass in the 90's, IIRC.
> 
>> I'm also guessing that FCC wrote regulations lacking legal authority of
>> the Telecom Act, which sure as hell didn't anticipate VoIP.
>>
>> Tell me any of my guesses are wrong.
> 
> Yeah, the regulatory framework is a bit behind what's actually being 
> used in service right now. This has pretty much always been the case. 
> You'd be horrified by how much of any given telco's actual revenue comes 
> from just skirting the boundaries of regulatory in a way that the other 
> carriers just agree to go along with because we all make some dough in 
> the end. See: CABS and recip-comp. Whoooo boy.

Any good CABS stories?

The closest I ever got to billing was touching some v.35 cable hanging off 
a switch that sent billing data to windows NT machine that FTPed data off 
to a mainframe. As laughable as that sounds, it was probably pretty damn 
high tech at the time.