Tomalika Thompson
March 28, 2015
NT1310/ Thursday Evening
Unit 2 Assignment 1

Service Provider Types RBOCS also known as regional bell operating companies is the term to better define the seven companies spun off from AT&T in 1984. The initial seven were Ameritech, BellSouth, Bell Atlantic, Nynex, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telesis and US West. RBOCS provides a local loop services to most of the United States by functioning as local exchange carriers, while AT&T was left to provide long distance carrier services and to function as an interior exchange carrier. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed RBOCs and independent LECs to compete with existing IXCs for long-distance carrier business, allowed mergers, and essentially opened up the telecommunications market to all kinds of companies, including cable television companies. Of the seven original RBOCs, only five remain today. ILEC also known as incumbent local exchange carrier is a telephone company that provided local services when the Telecommunications Act 1996 was enacted. ILEC held the regional monopoly on landline service before the market was opened to competitive local exchange carriers, or the corporate successor of such a firm. ILEC has been absorbed into Verizon, an RBOC. In some areas, an independent telephone company is responsible for providing local telephone exchange services in a specified geographic area. CLEC also known as competitive local exchange carrier is a telephone company that competes with an incumbent local exchange carrier such as a Regional Bell Operating Company, GTE, and ALLNET. With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, there has been an explosion in the number of CLECs. The Act allows companies with CLEC status to use ILEC infrastructure in two ways: Access to UNEs and Resale. For CLECs the most important UNE available to them is the local loop, which connects the ILEC switches to the ILEC's present customers. With the local loop, CLECs will be able to connect their switches with the ILEC's switches, thus giving them access to ILEC customers. MSO also known as Multiple System Operators is a term used in the cable industry to describe a company which owns and operates two or more cable TV systems. the term today is usually reserved for companies that own a large number of cable systems, such as Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications, and Videotron in Canada; Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable in the United States; or Virgin Media in the UK. ISP is an Internet service provider which is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. Internet service providers may be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned. Internet services typically include Internet access, Internet transit, domain name registration, web hosting, Usenet service, and colocation.