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Becoming a CLEC?
eric76 asks: "It finally happened. DSL has come to the town where I work in Texas. While most would see that as a plus, the problem is that I work for a small ISP offering dialup and fixed wireless. The $26.95 / month DSL could drive us out of business. So I'm looking at what it takes to become a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier). That is, we'd become a local telephone company purchasing telephone service, particularly DSL, at wholesale from the ILEC (SBC) and reselling it at retail prices. Has anyone else gone through this? What did it cost? How long did it take? Is there a minimum size to make it worthwhile?"
He did not ask how to do it or what the laws are, he asked for practical experience.
And as far as being of any interest to the rest of us, many of us here are very interested in legal issues especially as they relate to free trade. While the law may provide for CLEC's, it is reasonable to ask if it is practical for the average company to implement.
You waited until there was already established competition to do this? Why didn't you do this when the DSL market was unfulfilled?
He's trying to buy DSL service from the phone company and resell it to end users. Pray tell, how would he be able to do that before the phone company offered DSL in the first place?
That would be a pretty impressive trick.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Most Qwest residential packages are in the 256-512kbps range. 200 users on a T-1 is pretty light surfing, but feasible (in most of Qwest's regions). The rocky mountain area is retiree heaven (those social security and pension checks are pretty decent to great money here) if you can put up with the cold. Incidentally health care for retirees is top notch as well (all the retirees have attracted lots of arthritis doctors and such).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The market is changing fairly dramatically with respect to the last mile connectivity and services.
I work for a company building triple play (phone/tv/internet aka voice/video/data) hardware/software for rural ILECs and CLECs using ethernet over ADSL2+ and VoIP. One of the things we're finding is that the takeup rate for more advanced services is surprisingly low. Many people are sticking with their POTS phones until the phone company they've used for 2 decades forces them to switch. While you will lose more modern customers to a DSL solution, you may be surprised at how many would be willing to keep your service for the right price (less than $10/mo).
While I can't give information related to becoming a CLEC, I can tell you that DSL is an interum solution on the train to fiber. The decision has been made - fiber to the home is coming, with wireless challenging it for remote areas. While I work on DSL equipment, we know that fiber will be the preferred solution within the next 3 years for cities (if they don't already have it), 7-10 for more rural locations. It's cheaper to run wireless in the short term, but the bandwidth advantages of fiber and subscription services that it brings outweigh the costs. With that said, investing lots of money without getting the fiber or wireless benefit may end up costing you more than you'll get (bad ROI).
Personally, I would consider diversifying your offerings. Talk to Vonage about being a local PSTN call termination center for them; get a SIP Server and softswitch of your own and begin handing VoIP PSTN traffic (you have a data head end), etc. If you were somewhat enterprising, you could actually sell VoIP numbers to local businesses, handle their PSTN/VoIP calls, provide ENUM services, etc. IE: use your equipment for other things in addition to simple dialup internet access.
Good luck.