This Perspective argues that the Federal Communications Commission's current "trigger framework" of counting the number of competitors in a market in order to determine whether or not a rival is "impaired" is a model of analytical inconsistency. Specifically, the Commission defines "impairment"...

This Perspective argues that while it is very important for policy makers to take a dynamic approach to telecoms, it unfortunately appears that many policymakers recently have used anecdotal evidence of intermodal competition to blur deliberately the line between "probability" and "ephemeral...

This POLICY PAPER presents an economic model showing how incumbent local exchange carriers may deter efficient facilities-based entry for high capacity loop facilities through the use of quantity-discount contracts for Special Access services. Since efficient entry is deterred, these contracts...

One of the most contentious debates in modern telecommunications policy regards whether or not a regulatory mandated reductions in the per-minute costs of long distance carriers - access charges domestically and settlement rates internationally - are fully reflected in the per-minute prices for...

On April 8, 2004, the Heritage Foundation released a Backgrounder entitled Are U.S. Telecom Networks Public Property? by James Gattuso and Norbert Michel. There, the authors claim that the current telephone network was paid for by the shareholders of the incumbent Bell monopolists, and not by...

This essay argues that the core purpose of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was never fundamentally about the deregulation of incumbents or to encourage incumbent investments per se (although certainly an intended eventual consequence) but, as the Supreme Court observed, to "reorganize markets...

In its December 1998 issue, the Federal Communications Law Journal published a law review article surveying the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC or Commission) international policy initiatives between 1985 and 1998. As that article explained, one of the centerpieces of the FCC's...

In October 2003, the Phoenix Center released its POLICY BULLETIN NO. 7 entitled The Positive Effects of Competition on Employment in the Telecommunications Industry. This Bulletin included an analysis of employment trends in the telecommunications industry before and after the 1996...

This Policy Bulletin makes use of regression analysis to demonstrate that differences in UNE-P prices both across States and within States are due to genuine cost differences and differences in TELRIC, and are not because of regulatory failure by the States. These findings confirm an obvious...

This Paper discusses important economic characteristics of local exchange markets and the firms that participate therein. First, this Paper explains that entry into the local exchange market requires large fixed and sunk costs, making entry risky and necessitating scale economies. Consequently,...