Many ISPs have told FCC that if it deregulates Bell companies’ DS...

Many ISPs have told FCC that if it deregulates Bell companies’ DSL services, ISP industry will cease to exist. Group of 60 small businesses rounded up by BroadNet Coalition’s grass-roots efforts wrote FCC Chmn. Powell Wed. saying they could lose CLEC DSL providers they used by proposed FCC actions. BroadNet said ILECs after deregulation would lose incentive to offer fair wholesale rates to competitors. BroadNet also has organized “fly-in” next week, when small ISP owners and chairmen of several state ISP associations will meet with FCC officials and Hill leaders to argue their case. Powell has indicated that his desire for broadband market is competition between platforms such as DSL and cable, known as intermodal competition, but ISPs say deregulation to accomplish that could doom some classes of competitors, particularly ISPs offering DSL without their own facilities. BroadNet Coalition Exec. Dir. Maura Colleton said it wasn’t just ISPs that would suffer, but it would hurt small businesses that relied on competition in commercial DSL offerings. “These are not the usual suspects” pleading with FCC, she said of businesses writing to Powell: “They don’t lobby these issues for a living.” In letter, small businesses wrote that they couldn’t afford T-1 lines but DSL competition had “afforded us, for the first time, with a viable alternative to bring our businesses into the networked economy.” Cable isn’t built out to many small businesses, Colleton said, and its asymmetrical architecture doesn’t work well for businesses that require large uploading capability, and security risks remained higher on that platform. FCC has 3 rulemakings under way that could affect DSL -- triennial review of unbundled network elements (UNEs), with reply comments due earlier this week; ILEC “dominant-nondominant” broadband rulemaking and search for regulatory framework for wireline broadband access, which gathered reply comments July 1.