On 12/06/2015 11:31 PM, Mary Lou Carey wrote:
NC/NCI information is company specific so it's actually the ILEC that documents that information......you just have to know where to go to look for it!
Technically, ILECs publish a lot of stuff publicly, to comply with the letter of regulations requiring them to do so. However, most of it is not digestible or usable to those who work outside the world of ILEC provisioning, so it has to be processed into commercial databases like the LERG and LCADS. The same mafia then charges for access to these, for reasons motivated by profit and creating systemic barriers to entry for small competitors. If anyone balks at the seemingly surreal cocktail of having to sell one's kidney for access to notionally public information, the ILECs can always say: "You can download the 90 page local tariff yourself right there from our web site, you just have to know where to look! The commercial databases are just adding value by composing it into readily machine-processable form!" This is one of the most common cop-outs of New Gilded Age sociopaths; "we're complying with the letter of the law, and we reserve the right to charge a reasonable fee for putting the information into a convenient form for you..." Except, there wouldn't be a need to take 90 pages of arcane prose and turn it into a few table rows of values if they did not themselves dictate the rules; there is no "value add" in the LERG because it is a response to a artificial contrivance, a purely invented problem of the ILECs' own deliberate making. It exploits information asymmetries and differences of power between big and small actors in the same way as pseudoscientific chemistry gibberish on early 20th century quack remedies, or the fine print on 264-page subprime mortgage issuance binders. I think that's really the essence of Erik's grievance, and it's a valid one. Sure, you can participate in the PSTN*. * Expensive semi-proprietary decoder ring and beaucoup bucks required. -- Alex -- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC 303 Perimeter Center North, Suite 300 Atlanta, GA 30346 United States Tel: +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) / +1-678-954-0671 (direct) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/