rts on both cost reduction and customer-specific service 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 Telecom Market Segments delivery if they are to hold on to their advantage, and must also develop the logical infrastructure required to offer, deploy, and bill for converged service packages. We now move our attention to the much-maligned CLECs. The CLECs As we noted earlier, the CLECs came into existence in concert with the release of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with plans to create a fully competitive market at the local loop level. Until that time, only the long-distance sector was fully competitive, with customers able to choose from among three major providers. The local loop was dominated by the ILECs. Since that time, the CLECs have carved out a reasonable piece of the market for themselves, supported by a certain degree of customer dissatisfaction with the ILECs, the promise of lower prices, and a num- ber of favorable regulatory decisions including the Unbundled Network Element-Platform (UNE-P), which offered a generic switching and access platform to all entrants. CLEC Challenges Of course, the creation of a local competitive market has been fraught with difficulty. Many of the CLECs filed for bankruptcy because of inabil- ity to attract an adequate customer base, and while some analysts believe that CLECs may own as much as 65 percent of the medium enterprise market, their overall showing is still relatively small. In fact, while it is easy to conclude that CLECs are largely small startups that are giving fits to the ILECs, this is not true: Ironically, the largest CLECs in the United States have traditionally been AT&T and MCI, although recent regulatory decisions may force them to drastically reduce their footprint in the local marketplace. For the most part, CLECs target the small-to-medium b