Federal Regulation and Competitive Access to Multiple-Unit Premises: More Choice in Communications Services?

The nature of competition in the United States’ communications sector changed significantly over the past two decades. Before the 1990s, ‘‘competition’’ referred to the fight among providers of discrete services, such as the contest among AT&T, MCI, and Sprint over the longdistance slice of the communications pie. Today, competition is much more likely to describe the fight over the entire pie, among firms offering a ‘‘triple play’’ of services---high-speed Internet service, video, and telephony---over a single broadband platform. Some firms recently expanded the pie with a ‘‘quadruple play’’ that includes wireless services as well. Cable operators, traditional wireline telephone companies, and, increasingly, wireless providers are competing to offer consumers both the underlying broadband platform and various bundled services that ride across it. However, not all consumers benefit from this competition in like manner.1 Public policy deliberations tend to focus more on differences in access to communications services either between consumers in rural and