selection. But they were still really paying access charges to themselves, giving them an effective advantage over separate providers. The Telecom Act did allow the IXCs to become CLECs, of course; MCI and AT&T sold millions of lines of UNE Platform during the early 2000s, allowing them to keep some of their own access revenues. But that too fell victim to the changed regulatory environment. CAPs Had Head Start on Both Service and Debt The CAPs, of course, were the first CLECs. They quickly turned their "access" networks into "local" ones. A major change was their ability to get local tele- phone numbers. Interstate-jurisdiction access services included outgoing calling and 800 service; as CLECs, they could also get local prefix codes, blocks of 10,000 numbers assigned to a specific geographic rate center. CLECs also inter- connected to the ILECs as peers. Access providers are "customers" of LECs, pay- ing them for both origination and termination services [6]. CLECs, on the other hand, pay the ILECs to terminate calls that their subscribers originated but are paid by the ILECs when they terminated calls originated by ILEC subscribers. Competitive Access Providers, the Costly Way to Local Competition This system, reciprocal compensation, turned out to be a major bone of conten- tion when applied to Internet-bound calls. (See Chapter 9.) Although the CAPs were the first CLECs to be up and running, they also had the biggest debt load. The Telecom Act made it possible to be a CLEC without spending the kind of money that the CAPs had spent. It authorized local competition via several avenues. Total service resale allowed the CLEC to sell ILEC-tariffed services under its own name, paying the ILEC's rate minus an "avoided cost discount" typically in the 15% to 25% range. Resellers required essentially no capital expenditure at all, save for billing systems. Facilities-based CLECs could provide their own networks in toto, interconnecting with the ILECs as peers, which is largely what the CAPs did, but they could also re