Is open access back in the frame in the US?

That's the latest whisper. According to the Wall Street Journal the FCC is having another serious look at open access and whether it could and should be used to boost broadband penetration and competition in the US market. That general idea was behind the 1996 Telecommunications Act which mandated unbundling in the US. That enabled competitive operators or CLECs (Competitive Local Exchage Carriers) to go into exchanges (central offices) and unbundle the incumbent's copper pairs, plug in some DSL, arrange backhaul from the exchange to the Internet and sell competitive broadband services to the incumbents' customers.

In fact the process was far more complicated to achieve than that brief description might indicate and unbundling ran into all sorts of problems - not the least of which was an 'over-exuberant' expectation of the share values of the CLECs who were deploying it. The crash of the telecoms market in 2001 owed much to the sudden realisation that it wasn't contributing as much as everyone thought.