Bundling Business

The strategy of the Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) has been to distinguish themselves from the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) by offering customers the enhanced services that the RBOCs are not rendering or are slow to provision.

While the ability to offer long distance service with dial tone is the clearest, and originally, the most significant differentiation, the promise of bundled services that will include voice, data and video over a single trunk, is why Wall Street is still in love with CLECs.

The ideal of bundled services dispensed to both residential and business customers on an itemized convergent invoice has been promised since deregulation, but yet to be realized on any measurable scale. Nevertheless, CLECs are offering local, long distance, Internet, and cable services, through one stream to some residential customers, to a small degree similar to that of STSs. These services include all the required enhancements to local access such as Caller-ID and 3-Way Calling.

Business customers however, have different bundled needs. An example of this is illustrated by the pursuit of IT managers to have the ability to engineer, i.e. bandwidth, a multifaceted T-1 that supports a combination of local, long distance and data traffic. This edition of CLEC Issues will describe one firm’s installation of “bundled service”, in, addition to examining data features currently on the CLEC market.