According to the FCC, the VoIP subscribers is 21 million not including Skype users. These figures are part of the 31-page report, "Local Telephone Competition". The report uses data from 2008!

Of the 162 million voice lines, 21M are VoIP. Consider that cablecos probably represent almost half that number. Vonage is about 2.5M subs then. VZ's FiOS is VoIP, so that's about 1M. So the hundreds (probably thousands) of VoIP Providers amount to 8M lines? OUCH! No wonder they need more funding.

According toi the report (via The Register), only 2M lines were business. 19M were residential.

Two resellers merged: GLOBALINX Purchases TMC for 'Robust' Agent Channel. GLOBALINX is an IP reseller. TMC is a TDM reseller. Should be interesting to see how the Bell-heads work with the Net-heads, since the thinking is way different (and so is the approach to sales).

LightYear buys the assets of SETEL. SouthEast, a Pikeville, Ky.-based CLEC, filed for bankruptcy in September of 2009, mainly due to bills owed to the ILEC. Sources tell me that a court case over disputed UNE's resulted in a multi-million dollar back billing which forced the BK protection. The Business Journal has details of the asset purchase. According to Yahoo, SETEL had 33,000 customers and revenue of $37.5M.

CLEC's forced into BK is not that unusual. Another KY based CLEC, Win.net, also filed BK last year. The largest debtor was the ILEC. CommPartners was recently forced into bankruptcy protection due to ILEC bills. Honestly, in some cases it's the CLEC business model. In other cases I have seen, the order for a UNE goes into the system as Special Access and the CLEC gets billed a hundred times what they expected and termination liability coupled with late fees and billing penalties pushes the CLEC over. I still maintain that the billing department for an ILEC is a revenue stream. They bill in error on purpose and hardly ever fix it. In fact, account execs I know at the ILEC don't even want to spend time fixing it. So what does that tell you? Telecom is broken.

[Just a warning: This is a Rant, so you can skip it if you want.]

I just finished reading Barry Eisler's book, Inside Out. Eisler used to work for the CIA. Page 301: "Number 1, the country is run by corporate interests. I never understand when people get worked up about socialism. There's no socialism here/ There's corporatism."

I don't know about you, but all during the healthcare debate, my Facebook page was covered up with people crying about how America was a socialist state. It just goes to show how ignorant the average voter is. (Thanks Fox "News" for stirring up the public but not educating them at all). 

And another thing: We already have free healthcare in this country. It's called the ER. Anyone without insurance - homeless, illegal immigrant, other people who know how to game the system - know that they can use the emergency room at a public funded hospital to get treatment, drugs, and even a bed occasionally. All at taxpayer expense.

The whole healthcare debate is so that we can shift the money to Big Pharma and Insurance companies instead of Medicare, which is bankrupt, by the way.

Last I read there were about 14,000 lobbyists in DC for the 535 Congress Critters. Eisler writes that there is only about a 2% churn in Congress. That's how ignorant voters are. They don't like how things rae going, but they vote in the same critter over and over.

In the beginning, Congress was part-time. These guys had JOBS as farmers, merchants, etc. They came together in the Winter (after Harvest) for a short while to perform the necessary Federal things. Now it's a full-time well-paid machine that is out of control. How many more laws do we need? Hardly any. We don't have any new problems -- worse, we don't have any solution other than throw money at it - and I was told that if money would fix it, it wasn't a problem.

Anyway, so after reading Inside Out, I then watched Green Zone. Probably not the double dose of reality I needed. Now I get that both are fiction, but then many of you think that Fox "News" is actually news, so forgive me for thinking that there is always a good dose of reality even in fiction.  Green Zone is about the fact that our US President went to war with Iraq on fabricated intelligience that he later blamed on the CIA. Good movie. Good book. Read and see if you disagree with me. I welcome the dialogue.