BEFORE THE PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF COLORADO
--------------------------------------------- In the Matter of Advice Letter No. 2663, Regarding US West Communications' Verified Application per Rule 57. ---------------------------------------------
Docket no. 97A-243T
The undersigned Carl Oppedahl, a ratepayer in the State of Colorado, hereby files an Objection in the above-captioned proceeding.
At the present time the undersigned is aware of some reasons why the Application of US West should be denied, and it is likely that during the proceedings herein other reasons will also become evident. I have petitioned for leave to intervene in this action, but do not yet know whether the Commission will grant that petition for leave to intervene. Thus, to protect the record in the event the Commission denies my petition for leave to intervene, the present Objection is being filed to summarize briefly the some of the presently known reasons why the Application of US West should be denied.
The Application should be denied due to misstatements of fact by US West in the Application. The application of US West states that "there is no revenue impact associated with this filing." This is false. In fact the revenue impact of this filing is substantial, because the application, if granted, would stifle competition in the provision of local area data services. As such it would strengthen US West's present monopoly on local area data services and would force customers to use high-priced (indeed, greatly overpriced) local area data services from US West.
Another misstatement of fact by US West is the statement that "subscriber line carrier systems ... cannot be used for LADS circuits". This is simply false. First, any two points served by the same subscriber line carrier system ("SLIC") can perfectly well be connected by LADS circuits. Second, even in areas served by SLICs there are sometimes metallic copper pairs to spare between the SLICs and the central office, in which case those spare pairs can be allocated to LADS use. Indeed in some cases the installation of a SLIC permits dozens of voice lines that were previously served by metallic copper to be served by a T1 or T3 line, thus freeing up copper pairs in the cable which produce no revenue thereafter unless they are allocated to LADS or other nonvoice use.
Since the Application relies upon these representations by US West, and since the representations are untrue, the Application should be denied.
The Application should be denied because US West made misleading statements in the Application. US West states, apparently in an effort to mislead the Commission as to the effects of the proposed relief, that there are only eighteen LADS customers in Colorado as of March 1997. This misleads the Commission in at least two ways.
First, US West has actively concealed the availability of LADS service from would-be customers. In the past three months, I personally had at least three telephone conversations with US West business office personnel trying to sign up for a simple "dry" metallic copper pair, and was repeatedly told, most recently by a Mr. Bob Parks, that there was no way to do this and that the only option was to sign up for a line with a dial tone. As a relatively recent newcomer to this State, I only recently learned that US West's terminology for this type of service is "LADS" service. In the case of the telephone call with Mr. Parks I was first told that there was no such thing, after which I asked "isn't there something called LADS service?" and suddenly Mr. Parks agreed that there was such a thing and began to quote prices and the like.
In recent days I have heard many, many anecdotal reports from other ratepayers in this State of similar evasion and dissembling when US West has been asked about the type of service that it calls LADS service.
It bears noting that the existence and availability of LADS service is not disclosed anywhere in US West's White Pages nor on its Web site.
Assuming that my experiences and those of others with whom I have recently spoken are not atypical, then it seems likely that the present low level of usage of LADS service is probably due in large part to US West's active concealment of the service.
Second, it is not the past usage of LADS service that matters but its likely usage today, tomorrow and in future. It has become increasingly evident that digital subscriber lines are going to be important in coming years. US West has been very slow to roll out digital subscriber line services and has committed to no timetable for its deployment. The prices which US West has proposed for its digital subscriber line services are far higher than normal expected competitive prices for such services. Competitors of US West would like to use LADS service to provide digital subscriber line services, as shown for example in the attached article from Network World (US West Changes the Rules, Derails Competitor's DSL Plans, June 9, 1997) and the need for such services is likely to grow quickly in coming years. In addition, ratepayers such as myself would like to use LADS service to interconnect our own multiple premises, and the need for such services will also grow quickly in coming years. The rapid growth in the importance of the Internet has led and will continue to lead to a great need for digital communications links between Internet Service Providers and between customer locations. This need will increase greatly in coming years as the Internet continues to grow.
The "substitute services" which US West urges be used in place of LADS service are much more expensive or pitifully slow. The ratio of cost to benefit for an LADS line can be great: $24 or $50 per month with an LADS line can provide bandwidths of anywhere from 56K bps to T1 rates, depending on the terminal equipment selected by the customer. To get comparable bandwidth by means of the "substitute services" urged by US West would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. It is no wonder US West wants to eliminate LADS and force customers over to services which are much more lucrative to US West.
The other supposed "substitute services" urged by US West (e.g. analog private line data service and digital data service) offer pitifully slow data rates that are of little or no interest to any present-day ratepayer. Analog private line data service is bandwidth-limited to 3000 Hz. Digital data service offers speeds of 2.4, 4.8, 9.6, 19.2 or 56K bps, of which only the 56K speed would be of any interest at all. Indeed, any customer that considers, even for a moment, the possibility of using analog private line data service or digital data service for local area data transmission will quickly realize that it is cheaper and faster simply to use two V.34 modems on a voice line and to leave the modems dialed up around the clock. It is difficult to imagine that this is what US West wants, yet its proposed tariff cutoff would encourage precisely that. In any event, the "substitute services" urged by US West are variously either much more expensive or pitifully slow.
The Application should be denied due to US West's lack of candor. US West represents to this Commission that the reason for refusing to take more orders for LADS is "limited demand". There is, in fact, substantial demand for this service and the demand will increase in coming years. US West's real reason for refusing to take more orders for LADS is that US West wants to hamper companies (such as ISPs) that would compete with US West in the provision of local area data services. US West's lack of candor should be considered fully by this Commission in reaching a decision to deny the requested relief.
US West's expected "back-up" reason for requesting this relief (crosstalk) is hypocritical and unfounded. It is expected that US West, when presented with objections to its requested relief, will retreat to a fallback position, namely that even if the reasons given in its Application are unfounded, namely the claim that LADS lines cause cross-talk interference with other lines in the same outside plant cables. US West offered this claim in the attached Network World article, for example.
But in making this claim, US West ignores that its own digital subscriber line (DSL) services will be passing through those same outside plant cables. If crosstalk were a reason not to pass digital signals over twisted pairs in outside plant cables, then US West should not be allowed to offer its own DSL services.
In fact, it has been commonplace for many years now for US West to pass a variety of high-speed digital services intermixed with each other and with voice services, all on the same outside plant cables. These high-speed digital services include T-1 lines, 56K lines, frame relay at many different data rates, ISDN, and many different customer LADS services, all of which have coexisted quite comfortably with each other and with voice services. My own residential service, for example, is in a cable that also contains a 56K frame relay circuit, with no evident crosstalk problems. And the pair gain (SLIC) box that serves my neighborhood is itself served by a T-1 line that shares a cable to the central office with many other T-1 lines and with a variety of other lines. The comfortable coexistence of many different high-speed digital services in outside plant cables is exactly why US West does not hesitate to carry on its plans to deploy DSL services, and this comfortable coexistence is exactly why US West should not be permitted to raise the straw man of crosstalk as a supposed reason to block digital services (including DSL services) provided by ratepayers who use LADS lines to this end.
Nonetheless, even if there were some bona fide technical reason why digital services cannot share cables (and even if US West were to come up with some plausible reason why its digital services do not cause crosstalk while the digital services of its customers and competitors (carried on LADS lines) supposedly can cause such crosstalk, the correct regulatory response is not to cut off LADS service from customers and competitors. The correct regulatory response is to determine what changes, if any, should be made to the tariff to permit continued LADS service.
I am unaware of even a single instance in which digital services on telephone company outside plant cables have caused crosstalk. Indeed there are metropolitan areas (though not in Summit County!) in which there are many, many ISDN lines and other DSL services sharing cables with each other and with voice services and to my knowledge none have reported such crosstalk.
In any event, US West's unsupported statement that crosstalk is a problem, and is indeed supposedly a grave enough problem to justify cutting off LADS service, raises questions which would have to be answered before the Commission could rule on the Application:
A grant of the requested relief would have an adverse effect on the public switched network. US West, like all of the RBOCs, has complained in recent months that Internet users leave their modems dialed up to their ISPs for hours at a time, or even 24 hours a day. The complaint is that this activity consumes resources in the public switched telephone network (such as central office switching matrix capacity and interoffice trunks) to a degree that far exceeds the level of resource consumption by ordinary voice traffic. This complaint by the RBOCs has led to requests for tariff relief of many types, including "modem taxes" to be imposed on Internet Service Providers, as well as other tariff measures that are expressly intended to provide disincentives to conduct lengthy local telephone calls.
What should follow from this is that the RBOCs, including US West, would welcome subscriber use of LADS lines. Every data connection over an LADS line is a data connection which does not consume any public switched telephone network facilities at all. No central office facilities are consumed, no interoffice trunks, nothing at all. The customer is only using copper, and is paying a price which was long ago determined by the PUC to be sufficient to cover the use of the copper.
By cutting off new orders for LADS service, US West is very directly urging data customers to use voice lines with analog modems, and to leave those voice lines dialed up for hours or days at a time, as a substitute for LADS service. To the extent that the RBOCs, including US West, are correct in saying that such voice line usage harms the public switched network, then the proposed relief of cutting off LADS service increases that harm. The relief, if granted by this Commission, would harm the public switched telephone network. The Application should be denied for that reason alone.
US West's lack of consistency on this point should prompt skepticism as to the bona fides of US West's present application.
The Application should be denied because US West serves Summit County very poorly, with antiquated equipment, and if the Application were granted the service would be even poorer. There is no ISDN service within a hundred miles of Summit County. There is no xDSL service of any kind available from US West in Summit County. For many exchanges in Summit County, the only dial tones available are analog dial tones. The central office and outside plant serving my home has so many analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions that I am unable to use the new 56K bps modems. The universal response of US West when a Summit County ratepayer asks about data services is to suggest frame relay, nothing else.
There is an enormous need for competitive services in Summit County, and most of those services would rely on the ability to use copper pairs from US West to deliver those services. There is also an enormous need in Summit County for ratepayers such as myself to be able to use such copper pairs for local area data services. If US West is permitted to cut off LADS service, the result will be foreclosure of any possibility of such competitive and customer-supplied services. Ratepayers in Summit County, already twenty years behind Denver and the rest of the country in terms of telephone company infrastructure, will fall further behind as Denver and the rest of the country begin to use DSL and other modern digital data services.
There is no need for expedited treatment of US West's application. The economic future of the State of Colorado depends to a great extent on the wisdom and vision of this Commission. This State needs better data communications if it is to support the kinds of data-intensive and Internet-related businesses that will provide job growth into the next century. If this Commission makes hasty and nearly irreversible decisions to foreclose meaningful local loop data options and competition, the result will simply strengthen US West's monopoly and hamper this State's development.
<signed> ______________________ Carl Oppedahl P O Box 5563 Frisco, CO 804443-5563 email: carl@oppedahl.com
I hereby certify that on June 17, 1997, the foregoing document was served by US Mail upon US West by its counsel of record:
Melissa A. Dalla, Esq. Denman & Corbetta 1290 Broadway #702 Denver, CO 80203-5607 <signed> _________________ Carl Oppedahl
This page is <http://www.panix.com/~oppedahl/lads/obj.htm>.