usiness mar- ket, which is largely underserved by the ILECs, whose primary focus is on the large business and residence sectors. Most CLECs resell services at a price that is 15 to 20 percent lower than the ILEC price and can thus attract a share of the market that is price sensitive. In fact, the numbers are significant: ILECs lease 20 million lines to resellers at an average of 40 percent of retail, although these numbers could change with the recent regulatory changes announced in recent months by the FCC-and Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telecom Market Segments Chapter 8 which continue to be announced. The ongoing regulatory circus, com- bined with the burgeoning deployment of IP-based voice by various mar- ket sectors, will continue to make this game an exciting one for the CLECs. Stay tuned! The Interexchange Carriers (IXCs) There are four main long-distance players in the United States: AT&T, MCI, Verizon, and Sprint. These carriers face a number of seemingly insurmountable problems including rapidly increasing customer counts, growing minutes of use (MoU) per subscriber, and a rapidly declining dollars-per-transported-bit-per-mile figure, the combination of which is deadly. Needless to say, this explains their compelling argument for accelerated local service and broadband entry. One bone of contention for the IXCs is that more than 40 percent of all IXC revenues are paid to ILECs as access charges. Access charges are the fees paid to ILECs by long-distance carriers for the right to use local exchange facilities for the origination or termination of traffic trans- ported to or from one exchange to another by an interexchange carrier. And while some access charges are billed directly to the end user, most of them are paid by interexchange carriers-not an insignificant amount of money. IXCs hope that future regulatory