U.S. v. Western Elec. Co., Inc., s. 90-5333
| Decision Date | 24 July 1992 |
| Docket Number | 90-5337,Nos. 90-5333,90-5351,90-5365,90-5335,90-5367 and 90-5373,s. 90-5333 |
| Citation | 969 F.2d 1231 |
| Parties | , 1992-2 Trade Cases P 69,905 UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., et al. Bell Atlantic Corporation, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., et al. US West, Inc., Appellant. UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., et al. Ameritech, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., et al. Pacific Telesis Group, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., et al. BellSouth Corporation, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., et al. Southwestern Bell Corporation, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America v. WESTERN ELECTRIC COMPANY, INC., and American Telephone and Telegraph Company NYNEX Corporation, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit |
Stephen M. Shapiro, with whom Mark I. Levy and Michael K. Kellogg, for Bell Companies, John Thorne, Michael D. Lowe, and Michael E. Glover, for Bell Atlantic Corp., Jeffrey S. Bork, for US WEST, Inc., Richard W. Odgers, Margaret DeB. Brown, and Stanley J. Moore, for Pacific Telesis Group, Walter H. Alford and Mark D. Hallenbeck, for BellSouth Corp., Liam S. Coonan, Ann Meuleman, and Martin E. Grambow, for Southwestern Bell Corp., and Raymond F. Burke, for NYNEX Corp., were on the joint brief, for Bell Co. appellants in all cases.
Nancy C. Garrison, Atty., Dept. of Justice, with whom James F. Rill, Asst. Atty. Gen., and Catherine G. O'Sullivan, Atty., were on the brief, for Federal appellee in all cases.
David W. Carpenter, with whom Mark C. Rosenblum and Howard J. Trienens, were on the brief, for appellee American Tel. & Tel. Co. in all cases.
Michael H. Salsbury, with whom Chester T. Kamin and Carl S. Nadler, were on the brief, for appellee MCI Communications Corp. in all cases. Anthony C. Epstein also entered an appearance, for appellee.
Martin T. McCue entered an appearance, for appellee U.S. Tel. Ass'n in all cases.
Gail L. Polivy entered an appearance, for appellee GTE Corp. in all cases.
John E. Ingle, Deputy Associate Gen. Counsel, and Robert L. Pettit, Gen. Counsel, filed a statement, for amicus curiae F.C.C. in 90-5333, explaining an FCC order.
Before: SILBERMAN, WILLIAMS, and SENTELLE, Circuit Judges.
Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge SILBERMAN.
The seven regional Bell Operating Companies (BOCs or Companies) and the United States appeal from the district court's denial of a waiver of the AT & T consent decree to permit centralized provision of the "signaling" component of long distance telephone calls. The appellants 1 maintain that their motion for a waiver should not be evaluated under the standard set forth in section VIII(C) of the decree--whether the proposal presents no substantial possibility of impeding competition--but rather under section VII and the more permissive test for unopposed decree modifications that we applied to the information services portion of the Triennial Review case: whether the requested waiver would be certain to lessen competition. See United States v. Western Elec. Co., 900 F.2d 283, 308 (D.C.Cir.) (Triennial Review Opinion ), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 283, 112 L.Ed.2d 238 (1990).
We think that the section VIII(C) standard applies and that the BOCs failed to demonstrate that their proposal satisfied that standard. We therefore affirm the judgment of the district court.
The 1982 consent decree settled the government's antitrust suit against the "Bell System" by first separating the BOCs 2 and their monopolies over local telephone ("exchange") service from AT & T and its more competitive long distance ("interexchange") and equipment manufacturing businesses and then--with section II(D)'s "line-of-business" restrictions--prohibiting the BOCs from reentering those and other competitive markets. See generally United States v. American Tel. & Tel. Co., 552 F.Supp. 131 (D.D.C.1982) (Decree Opinion), aff'd mem. sub nom. Maryland v. United States, 460 U.S. 1001, 103 S.Ct. 1240, 75 L.Ed.2d 472 (1983); United States v. Western Elec. Co., 569 F.Supp. 1057 (D.D.C.) (Reorganization Opinion), aff'd mem. sub nom. California v. United States, 464 U.S. 1013, 104 S.Ct. 542, 78 L.Ed.2d 719 (1983).
Section II(D)(1) of the decree, which prohibits the BOCs from providing any "interexchange telecommunications services," was implemented, and the scope of the seven BOCs' local monopolies defined, by dividing the country geographically into 164 "exchange areas" (better known as "LATAs"). 3 See generally United States v. Western Elec. Co., 569 F.Supp. 990 (D.D.C.1983) (LATA Opinion ). Each local operating company (see note 2) encompasses several LATAs but is nevertheless allowed to transmit telecommunications information only between points within a single LATA, providing what is, basically, the traditional local telephone service. When a person in one LATA calls a person in another, the BOC serving the caller's LATA must transmit the call to an interexchange carrier, such as AT & T or MCI, which then carries the call on its own network across the LATA boundaries, where it is picked up by the BOC serving the called party's LATA. (If the caller and called party live in different LATAs within one Company's region, the same Company both passes and picks up the interexchange call.) Section II(A) of the decree obliges the BOCs to provide such "exchange access" services to all interexchange carriers, and section IV(F) requires them to do so "at a point or points within [a LATA] designated by [the] interexchange carrier." 4 These "points of presence" in each LATA are thus the locations where the telecommunications networks of the seven Companies and the numerous interexchange carriers interconnect. See LATA Opinion, 569 F.Supp. at 994 n. 13.
The telephone "call" that a Company passes to an interexchange carrier consists of two components. One is the actual communication (e.g., the voices) of the calling and called parties. The other is "network control signaling," which directs the operation of the telecommunications network, telling the switches and circuits how and when to set up and disconnect a call. The signaling indicates that a receiver has been picked up, what digits were dialed, whether the called line is ringing or busy, when the phone is hung up, and so forth. When the decree was approved in 1982, almost all signaling was "in-band," meaning that the communication and its associated network control signals were transmitted over the same circuit and therefore delivered to the interexchange carrier at the same location--the carrier's point of presence in each LATA. In-band signaling, however, has significant limitations. Because the signals travel over the same circuit as the callers' communication, they must precede or follow the communication. In-band signaling is also relatively slow and can carry relatively little information.
In recent years a new signaling technology has emerged. In "out-of-band" or Common Channel Signaling (CCS), the signals are transmitted over a system of switches and circuits separate from that of the communications they control. The CCS and communications networks are not parallel but rather linked only at special CCS switches known as Signal Transfer Points (STPs). Out-of-band signaling is much more efficient than in-band. The CCS network contains only signals, which can be packeted into bursts of information and loaded into a circuit with no gaps; in contrast, a single voice communication takes up an entire circuit, even when the parties are not saying anything. As a result, a single CCS circuit can carry the signaling for over 10,000 calls. Each STP pair, moreover, can be connected to multiple communications switches, allowing a few STP pairs to serve a very large area.
The advantages of CCS are undisputed. Its speed markedly reduces call set-up time--the time between dialing on one end and ringing on the other--a benefit of particular value to long distance service. It also frees circuits for communications by not clogging them while callers listen to busy signals or service announcements. And it provides the technological foundation for a variety of new telecommunications services, including some for which the signaling functions as part or all of the communicated information. For example, CCS enables the telephone number of the calling party to be transmitted to the called party, allowing such caller identification features as distinctive ringing and selective call screening, call waiting, and call forwarding.
The BOCs have begun to deploy CCS networks for use in providing local (intra-LATA) exchange services. The CCS efficiencies and network structure have allowed the Companies to deploy centralized STP pairs, each pair having the capacity to serve several of a Company's LATAs. 5 US WEST's STP pair in Minneapolis, for example, serves U S WEST switches in six of its LATAs. In 1989, in fact, the BOCs predicted that all 164 LATAs could be served by only 27 STP pairs, although many more pairs have been installed in the last three years. The interexchange carriers have also been deploying CCS networks for use in their interexchange systems. AT & T inherited the Bell System's nascent CCS network at divestiture, and MCI has also extended signaling facilities to almost every LATA. The smaller carriers have lagged somewhat behind.
This case is brought because the BOCs have not yet installed an STP pair in every LATA and wish to avoid having to do so just to allow the interexchange carriers to connect in every LATA. Instead, they would like authority to provide the carriers access to CCS service only at certain centralized locations. Under their proposal,...
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