Opinion ID: 794949
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Global's Services

Text: 4 Global is a CLEC in Vermont with its principal place of business in Quincy, Massachusetts. Global's customer base consists primarily of 20 dial-up Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which in turn serve about 150,000 dial-up users in Vermont. 4 Most of Global's ISPs have chosen to locate their equipment in Global's Quincy facility rather than in each local calling area. 5 Global's system interconnects with Verizon's in Brattleboro, Vermont. Pursuant to their interconnection agreement, Verizon delivers all of Global's traffic to that Brattleboro interconnection point. Global then aggregates the Internet calls it receives from around the region and delivers them to its ISP customers in Quincy. To accomplish this aggregation, Global relies on virtual NXX technology, which uses nongeographically correlated telephone numbers to identify callers. This arrangement spawned the dispute in the present case; Global essentially contends that Verizon is using its relatively more powerful position as the ILEC to prevent it from doing business, while Verizon asserts that Global is forcing Verizon to shoulder the costs of Global's services by taking advantage of Verizon's sunk costs in the infrastructure and offering services just different enough to sidestep the prevailing regulatory regime.