[February 26, 2003]

"The broadband decision also reflects an apparent unwillingness or inability to learn the lessons of the past.

In the late 1980s, immediately after the breakup of AT&T, the Bell companies sought relief of the restriction prohibiting them from entering the information services marketplace. They argued that if they were permitted into information services, that would give them the incentive to deploy fiber-to-the-home.

As Dave Barry might say, 'I am not making this up.'

Judge Harold Greene eventually let them into that business but they didn't deploy. Instead, they came back to Congress and the FCC and said that only if they were allowed into the cable TV business would they have the necessary revenue stream to deploy fiber-to-the-home. So in the Telcommunications Act, we bent over backwards to facilitate their entry into cable.

But again, they didn't get into cable to any great degree and they didn't deploy fiber-to-the-home. Why? Well, because they said they now needed 'interLATA data relief' for the emerging Internet marketplace. When they finally got around to opening their markets and obtaining long distance approval in their respective States, as you can now guess: they didn't deploy fiber-to-the-home. Neither did they criss-cross the country with newly-built long distance networks. They simply re-sold in large part the long distance services of AT&T, MCI, and Sprint.

Yet by then they had a new request.

Again, I am not making this up.

They said that if you de-regulate their new investments for high speed service, take out pesky competitors in the broadband marketplace, and remove certain regulatory oversight, then they'd really be going gangbusters getting fiber out to people's homes. They wanted a policy of 'new wires, new rules.'

Last Thursday, three of you agreed to endorse this proposition. And almost immediately afterwards, the Bell companies announced that they weren't going to invest. They will not deploy; that the premise of 4 years of legislation and months of your work at the FCC was nothing more than a 'fiber fable.'

By endoring the policy of 'new wires, new rules' the Bells say what we will now get is 'no new hires, no new investment.'

Do you feel betrayed? You guys look like Charlie Brown after Lucy pulls the football away. The Bells pulled it right out from under you."

—Respresentative Ed Markey (D-MA)
in his statement to the house subcommittee hearing on the FCC