Describe this historic legislation and some of its ramifications from your vantage point in the middle of it all. When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we all thought we were setting the stage for competition in the local market for plain old telephone service over the old public switched telephone network. Cable, long-distance and local telephone companies all said that they were going to enter each other's businesses. Entry turned out to be harder and more costly than expected. But the rise of the Internet has changed business plans again.
Companies can now compete to sell high-speed Internet access.
At the same time, all communications products are becoming digital bits. This brings down the cost of competition. Internet and digital technology have the potential to renew the promise of the telecom act. Circuit switches are giving way to packet switches. Instead of keeping an entire circuit open and dedicated to a single conversation for the length of the phone call, packet switching breaks the spoken words into tiny data packets that are disassembled, then transmitted separately over the most efficient routes possible and then reassembled at the other end of the call in microseconds.