ver happened, either. Who better than the ILECs knows that network ownership is the most critical factor for success in the local access game? If you control the network, you con- trol the customers. More importantly, if you don't have that control, don't get into the game. In the metro market, which is highly dependent on high-speed access technologies such as DSL (and, to a lesser degree, cable and wireless), these regulatory decisions represent pivot points in the evo- lution of the metro domain. If the FCC chooses to reduce the regulatory pressure on the incumbents, customers will invest in bandwidth at the edge, driving traffic into the metro-which will, in turn, drive traffic into the network core. Terminology Before we discuss the status of current regulatory decisions, let's take a moment to clarify some important terminology that relates to ongoing decisions. As part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, incumbent local service providers were required to "unbundle" their local loops-in other words, to create a list of all the billable elements that make up a local loop and determine wholesale prices for each element. This exercise would allow ILECs to set reasonable wholesale prices for their local loops to facilitate the creation of competition. Since CLECs were not inclined initially to build their own networks, they instead wanted to simply buy the loop elements for a wholesale price, mark the resulting loops up appropriately and resell them in competition with their ILEC competi- tors. These were known as unbundled network elements (UNEs). Ultimately, service providers took a different tack by creating what was known as the unbundled network element-platform (UNE-P), which was a technique under which CLECs could lease "packages" of elements including switching elements-in effect, an entire service platform. 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 U