PCCA Journal 4th Quarter 2013 - page 31

PCCA Journal|4
th
Quarter 2013
31
tion: The Infrastructure-Investment Race,” authored by Anna-
Maria Kovacs, current telco regulations that make mainte-
nance of existing telco networks a priority are diverting telco
investment from modern broadband networks and services.
Importantly, the report emphasized, these existing net-
works are not particularly relevant in the modern broadband-
enabled space. “Today, consumers enjoy a dazzling array of
communications choices, and they are exercising them with
abandon,” Kovacs maintained in the report. These choices,
she wrote, are the result of competition encouraged by the
Telecom Act of 1996. “The act helped to promote competition
by freeing the cable and telephone carriers to enter into each
others’ markets and by leaving satellite and wireless free to
do so, as well. Its most successful progeny is the internet,
which it left completely unregulated,” she said.
Today’s regulatory environment, though, fails to take into
account the changes fomented by that competition and puts
ILECs at a disadvantage in competing with newer unregu-
lated players in the marketplace.
“To ensure that ILECs can continue to provide innova-
tive solutions for consumers and compete effectively against
other platforms, they must be free to make the best use of
their capital. That, in turn, means dedicating their capital to
IP- and fiber-based broadband networks, rather than tying it
up in obsolete copper-based circuit-switched networks,” she
wrote.
To bolster that argument, Kovacs noted that ILECs held a
34 percent share of the consumer voice business, 14 percent
share of broadband access, and 10 percent share of video
markets at the end of 2012.
“It is time to stop treating the ILECs as monopolies that
must be hobbled and start treating them as useful assets
whose health is important to this nation’s economy and
global competitiveness,” she concluded.
AT&T Wins Army Contract
for Communications
and Transmission Systems
T
he U.S. Army has awarded AT&T Government
Solutions, a division of AT&T, Inc., a place on a
$4.1 billion, five-year indefinite delivery-indef-
inite quantity (IDIQ) contract for the provision
of communications and transmission systems for the Project
Manager, Defense Communications and Army Transmission
Systems (PM DCATS.)
Under the terms of the contract, AT&T will supply the
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