The ultimate vaporware?

O ne of the unfortunate side effects of the telephone companies' drive to become big players in IT is that they rival hardware and software vendors for relentless hyping of undelivered products.

For example, what ever happened to AT&T's grand announcement in February 1997 of high-speed wireless local access lines to bypass the regional Bell operating companies? (A tiny trial in the Chicago area showed the costs were too high.)

But for sheer shamelessness, it's hard to find anything that quite matches super-RBOC SBC Communications' recent announcement of a new "national-local strategy" to compete outside its region.

If regulators would just allow SBC to acquire Ameritech, according to the strategy, SBC promises to finally compete against Bell Atlantic, BellSouth and US WEST in 30 of the RBOCs' largest cities.

Usually, when a company announces it intends to become a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC)it offers a few details. Here are some of the basic decisions facing a new CLEC, followed by SBC's responses to me on these issues:

Which vendors' switching and transmission equipment will you use?
We don't have that yet.

How many route-miles will your new networks cover?
We don't know the answer to that.

There are three methods of CLEC entry: Resell the incumbent's services, lease unbundled network elements (UNE) or build all your own facilities. Which will you use?
In each market, we'll be determining over the next year which strategies fit in each market - resale, UNE rebundling or facilities-based competition. (Thank you for repeating the question back to me.)

Why do you have to merge with Ameritech before becoming a CLEC?
We need the size and scope that we'll get by partnering with Ameritech because we don't want to do this piecemeal.

In other words, a $41 billion company - the combined revenue of SBC and Ameritech - can do wondrous things that the mere $25 billion SBC alone is helpless to pursue. Does that make sense to you?

The fact is financial analysts already consider SBC the healthiest, wealthiest carrier in the country. If SBC really wanted to become a CLEC, it could do so tomorrow.

But SBC's CLEC announcement wasn't aimed at you, the user. The announcement was aimed at regulators desperate to prove they haven't blown telecom reform by endorsing giant mergers. So the regulators ought to do a turnaround and think of themselves as users buying a CLEC service and ask all those same questions.

If they don't get better answers, when it comes time to rule on the merger, SBC's national/local strategy should be treated as what it looks like today - 100% pure unadulterated vaporware.