Chapter 9: Premises Network Services

Chapter 10: Local and Interexchange Network Services

Chapter 11: Cost Structures and Network Design

Chapter 12: Selecting Voice Services

Part Overview

This part describes voice services, underlying customer premises equipment (CPE), and network facilities that support them. In the not too distant past, separate facilities were furnished for voice, data, video, and other service types. Today, advanced technologies make multimedia switching and transmission possible. However, as indicated in Chapter 8, the main reason carriers vigorously pursue integrated service provision reflects not just the possibility for doing so, but the fact that such designs ultimately produce significant economies factors crucial to maintaining leadership (or sometimes surviving) in highly competitive global telecommunications markets.

Another development since the first edition of this book affecting our treatment of voice services here is the emergence of hundreds of new mobile carriers and competitive LECs and IXCs. Beginning with ATT's divestiture and the Modification of Final Judgement (MFJ) in 1984, and accelerating after the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the telecommunications landscape has markedly changed. In the first edition, for example, it was correct to (1) ascribe to LECs the major voice service role within local access and transport areas (LATAs), and (2) state that BOCs were prohibited, by law, from offering inter-LATA, interexchange services.

Now, as explained in Chapter 2, under 1996 Telecommunications Act rules, BOCs who fairly make their facilities available to entities establishing competitive LEC (CLEC) enterprises may pursue long-distance, inter-LATA, or IXC business.