 than they ever attained. The voice CLEC business in this regard was not much different from the DLEC sector. And of course some CLECs had both voice and DSL services. UNE Platform Displaced Resale and Discouraged UNE-Loop The FCC, during the boom years under Chairman William Kennard, had a lib- eral interpretation of some of the Telecom Act's more mystifying words. For example, Section 251 (d) of the Act said: (2) ACCESS STANDARDS-In determining what network elements should be made available for purposes of subsection (c)(3), the Commission shall consider, at a minimum, whether: (A) access to such network elements as are proprietary in nature is necessary; (B) the failure to provide access to such network elements would impair the ability of the telecommunications carrier seeking access to provide the serv- ices that it seeks to offer. [Emphasis added.] This became known as the "necessary and impair" test. The Kennard FCC held that almost all elements used in most telephone service, though not CLECs Winning Strategies Are Met by Rule Changes packet-switched data equipment such as DSLAMs or auxiliary nontelecom fea- tures such as voice mail, should be unbundled at TELRIC rates. Thus the entire analog telephone line, including switching, could be ordered as a set of UNEs. This combination became known as the UNE Platform (UNE-P). ILECs, not surprisingly, hated it and fought it everywhere they could. The Act said that elements could be combined; ILECs argued that it was the CLECs that had to do the combining, in their collocation cages. This was particularly illogical with regard to local switching and its associated elements such as shared interoffice transport. The latter element, by which CLECs using UNE-P paid for the usage of the trunks interconnecting the switches on the ILEC's local network, did not exist as a physical entity. It was shared, after all, and hard-wired to the ILEC switch. Nonetheless the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals initially supported the ILECs view. UNE-P thus did not really have a chance