If they open up their local networks, then they can enter interLATA voice and data markets. This balance safeguards competition, while providing the Bell Companies with the keys to their own deregulation. I urge you to stay this course of competition, while encouraging additional broadband pipelines into the home via cable, satellite and wireless technologies. The explosion of Internet access and Internet services to American consumers and American businesses has been unprecedented in the history of communications. Never before has a communications technology or medium penetrated consumer markets so quickly, and offered such a rich variety of information opportunity.
Some recent statistics provide a sense of the growth of narrowband Internet access.
The ISP market in the United States today is made up of more than 6,000 ISPs serving more than 60 million Internet users. As you consider what is the best set of rules for accelerating broadband deployment of local telecommunications services, think about whether you want rules that further entrench the Bell Companies in their local telecommunications monopolies or whether you want rules that encourage a competitive structure for the local telephone system and that support a competitive Internet. In contrast to the Internet, today's local telecommunications market is marked by the absence of competition. PSINet is one of the largest customers for each of the Bell Companies, and faces on a daily basis the consequences of the lack of competition in the local telecommunications market. Lack of local telecommunications competition produces fewer telecom choices, sub-optimal telecom offerings, and overpriced telecommunications services for Internet companies like PSINet, and ultimately for each and every Internet user in America.