That’s the date the government will begin letting SBC take copper subloops out of service if it has replaced those loops with fiber running from the central office to remote neighborhood terminals.

Fiber-to-the-neighborhood is the architecture behind , a three-year, $6 billion initiative that SBC launched in October 1999 to dramatically shorten the distance DSL service has to run over copper. But if you think decommissioning the rest of the copper plant from the remote terminal to the central office represents a long-awaited new day for broadband, you probably haven’t talked to a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) recently.

Far from heralding SBC’s plan as a breakthrough, the CLECs are enraged about it. They have convinced the to open what amounts to two Project Pronto investigations that will continue into the new year.

The resulting war between SBC and its local competitors is a regulatory battle like no other. SBC’s reputation as a sharp-elbowed regional Bell operating company has landed it in endless disputes with competitors at the FCC and in the courts. But this time it’s the legacy carrier arguing that more fiber and less copper is the way to go, and it’s the "next-generation" carriers that say they need an old-fashioned telephony plant to leapfrog the incumbent’s allegedly inadequate fiber-based broadband service.

Illogical? Not in Washington, D.C., where lawyers for both sides have poured into FCC offices to plead their cases. Plead is no exaggeration for many CLECs, which have staked their futures on the ability to sell DSL - and whose funding may run out if the FCC doesn’t rule their way soon.

Indeed, the fight over Project Pronto owes its roots to DSL’s quirky nature. Because DSL deteriorates over substantial distances, SBC plans to install up to 25,000 neighborhood terminals equipped with Alcatel DSL line cards. The Alcatel gear is supposed to terminate the short remaining copper run from homes and businesses and convert the traffic into ATM cells for shipping over the new fiber to ATM switches at SBC central offices.

The problem for the CLECs is where to put their DSL equipment. Under FCC rules, they’re entitled to collocation space in RBOC central offices. But - Catch-22! - under Project Pronto putting a DSL access multiplexer in an SBC central office doesn’t do CLECs any good because the copper loop into the central office disappears.

"The data CLECs are trapped behind the fiber," says Jonathan Lee, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Competitive Telecommunications Association (CompTel), a CLEC trade group. Until recently, FCC rules were murky about what rights CLECs have in remote neighborhood terminals.

What’s more, when SBC bought Ameritech in 1999, it promised the FCC it would put its broadband services into an arm’s-length data subsidiary that itself would have to petition SBC for items such as collocation space, as if it were a CLEC. So Project Pronto constitutes exactly the kind of favored treatment for SBC’s own data services that the Bell had promised to avoid, CLECs claim. When SBC tried to finesse that problem by asking the FCC to waive the Ameritech merger conditions so that the DSL line cards could be owned directly by the parent company, the CLECs hit the roof.

Yet SBC has held a trump card all along. If Project Pronto isfully implemented, it will bring DSL availability to 20 million homes that previously couldn’t be reached by any DSL carrier because of distance limitations. That’s a consumer benefit no CLEC can hope to match - one that SBC lobbyists have pressed hard with top FCC officials.

If SBC prevails, at least two of the other three RBOCs could follow its lead. Qwest Communications is looking closely at a remote-terminal buildout in the former US West territory to extend its DSL reach. And although Bell Atlantic officials told the FCC last spring they didn’t need many remote terminals in the heavily populated Northeast, the RBOC’s takeover of the more sparsely populated GTE territories under the merged Verizon is reportedly causing the company to rethink the issue.

In September, the FCC tried to end the SBC dispute with a compromise. The agency agreed to let the SBC parent company take ownership of the Alcatel equipment, guaranteeing it could be legally placed in SBC’s remote terminals. In return, SBC agreed to increase the size of its remote-terminal cabinets by 15% to 25%, enabling a limited number of CLECs to collocate DSL equipment in them.

But the FCC’s decision landed in the middle of a CLEC financial crisis, with stock and bond prices plunging and new money drying up. Because SBC is planning an average of 23 DSL neighborhood terminals per central office, the collocation offer was a dud for many CLECs.

"If we have to put our equipment next to theirs in every remote terminal, it’s going to cost a fortune," complains Howard Siegel, vice president of regulatory policy for IP Communications, a DSL CLEC that competes in SBC’s principal territories - Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell and Ameritech regions.

Even larger CLECs that are considering remote-terminal collocation are unhappy because the trunking back to the central office only uses ATM’s lowest class of service, available bit rate (ABR).

The FCC says ABR is suitable for generic Internet traffic, and SBC says it’s considering ATM constant bit rate for voice traffic. But CLECs that are pitching business DSL as a T-1 access alternative say SBC is ignoring ATM classes suitable for latency-sensitive enterprise data applications, such as real-time and non-real-time variable bit rate.

For all these reasons, CompTel in October petitioned the FCC to require a complete unbundling of all elements of Project Pronto, letting competitors choose the ones they like and add others at their discretion. In a separate proceeding, CLEC lobbyists convinced the FCC to consider forcing SBC to sell or give CLECs ownership of any copper loop it decommissions. That way CLECs could run DSL over "home run" loops from the central office to the premises with no remote terminals.

Now stop that!

SBC’s response: Enough is enough. It claims it’s the innovator, building an "overlay" on its telephone network to bring advanced services to the masses. Further restrictions will cause it to lose incentive, it says. That doesn’t wash with the CLECs, which claim many of the remote terminals are just upgrades of old digital-loop carriers that blocked DSL signals.

"SBC likes to call this an overlay network because that rings as something completely new," Siegel says. "But the fact is it’s using as much of its existing network as it can."

If the CLECs don’t get access to a big piece of that network this year, there could be a lot fewer CLECs in SBC-land when 2002 rolls around.