With a new FCC in place and pro-competition attitudes revived in Washington, times once again look promising for competitive providers. But that doesn’t mean CLECs should rest on their proverbial laurels – there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure fair access and pricing throughout the country. That’s much of what Larissa Herda, president, chairman and CEO of tw telecom inc. (TWTC) will discuss during her keynote speech Tuesday at the COMPTEL PLUS Convention & Expo in Dallas. Herda has run tw telecom for nearly 11 years, shepherding the business Ethernet services provider through years of prosperity and even some struggle. Business & Regulatory Editor Kelly Teal spoke with Herda in mid-February in advance of her speech. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
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| tw telecom's Larissa Herda |
What’s the main message you’ll share during your keynote speech tomorrow?
The main message will be about the regulatory environment, about how difficult it’s been for the past eight years for competitive telecommunications companies, about the growing need for connectivity to business customers. It’s all about the new telecom economy that is causing enterprise customers to require more and more bandwidth for things like cloud computing, telepresence, green IT.
There are a lot of opportunities for the carriers that are going to be in the room to be grow their businesses and the key is really all about innovation. Companies that are primarily monopoly-oriented seem to have trouble with innovations. I’ll talk about how we need to work together to influence the regulatory environment so competition can once again flourish. We obviously need some support from the FCC and from Congress.
What changes are you hoping to see?
There are really three basic broadband policy items for business customers that we’d like regulators to focus on. First [is] the ongoing and enhanced regulation for last-mile facilities in support of UNEs and special access. We want to make sure those are both available and continue to be available at affordable prices with performance requirements from incumbents.
Second is the ability to resell new services like Ethernet on fair and reasonable terms. The RBOCs have been deregulated for Ethernet. We think that is premature and we’ve been trying to negotiate agreements and it’s been very difficult. The lack of competition is frustrating – the RBOCs know there’s no where else to go.
The third area is interconnection. Technology is changing and we think interconnection needs to be agnostic.
