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Verizon (NYSE: VZ) says that TelePacific and other CLECs have plenty of time to respond to the ILEC community's efforts to retire copper in their wireline serving areas.
At issue is a request TelePacific made from the FCC in November for further clarification from the FCC on copper retirement could delay the telcos' transition to fiber and IP-based services.
TelePacific asked the FCC to examine the relationship between 251(b) retirement process and the Section 214(a) service discontinuance process. The CLEC is concerned that an ILEC's copper loop retirement could potentially cause it from having to discontinue provisioning service to a community or part of a community.
In particular, TelePacific says that if Verizon or another telco were to retire copper in part of its serving area it would not be able to provide Ethernet over Copper (EoC) services to a number of its existing school, libraries and rural healthcare clinic customers (RHC). Out of the 96 of these customers it serves under the e-Rate and RHC programs, the CLEC said that "63 have no fiber-based broadband alternative."
"Should the ILEC retire any portion of the copper route TelePacific uses to provide Ethernet over Copper, it is likely that TelePacific would no longer be able to offer those customers a competitive broadband service at reasonably comparable...