No, not sure how you got this idea, you think every mid-sized ISP in the '90s had connections to the service control points? For a CLEC to get a lot of the O/T benefits SS7 interconnection would be desirable, but not required.
That's true. I was assuming we were talking about telephony here strictly.
There are a few uses ISPs have for CLEC licenses that have nothing to do with phone. One is rights-of-way for network build-out, pole attachment, etc. Another is getting UNE rates on leased circuits instead of wholesale access rates. That still required interconnection and/or CO colocation for aggregation, but not SS7.
There were 2 other good reasons to have a clec license, at least in the rate-center type latas... (Chicago/Lata 358 comes to mind)... 1. was to play the reciprocal comp game with the ILEC... At least one CLEC's entire business model was nearly completely based on this early on (Focal Communications) 2. was to have a folded modem pool where all the rate centers terminated into one large modem pool. It was easy to turn up a few ds3s to a few tandem switches to receive inbound calls from a large portion of the lata. After you got up and running and found the 'hot spots' you'd then turn up end-office trunks to each of those rate centers to take advantage of the more favorable termination rates for #1. Ah the good 'ol days of the Dial-up isp biz... I remember 20+ Ascend Max TNT's each humming along with 16 inbound PRI's of dial-up... If I remember correctly tho, in order to connect to the tandems you had to be able to provide ss7 services. We got all of our ports out of a DMS500, but I do remember people using something from cisco to emulate a switch (SCC maybe?) and back end all the dial traffic into 5800's.... -J