This blog is the first of a two part series on regulated or “special access” for copper. This discussion is particular to the US, especially regarding the breakup of the Bell System. However, there are similar regulatory considerations worldwide, especially regarding shared access to new fiber facilities.
Before we get to the details of special access, it’s worth taking a look at how we got to the current situation. For those who came in late (and as a reminder for the rest of us), let’s fire up the WABAC machine and revisit the composition and breakup of the original AT&T, along with the beginnings of the CLECs.
Last week I attended the 40th anniversary celebration of Ethernet at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In this article, I offer a few highlights and several photos from this memorable event. 
The theme of the recent Ethernet Europe 2013 - held in Frankfurt, Germany - was “SDN, CE2.0 and Cloud Convergence.” In our busy, multi-tasking world, it seems the trend is to extend that frenzy to industry conferences as well. This annual Light Reading conference was co-located with the MEF's quarterly face-to-face meeting. Holding conference sessions on cloud convergence and CE2.0 in one session while right next door, the MEF technologists were hammering out the latest details of the next generation of specifications created an energetic vibe and opportunities to network during the breaks. Nan Chen from the MEF provided good-natured jabs aimed at the hype surrounding Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) before hinting at a forthcoming announcement from the MEF around cloud services. In hallway discussions between sessions, the audiences seemed to agree that Chen's foreshadowing was focused on the MEF work on new Carrier Ethernet features designed to make it easier to implement and manage dynamic capacity services. 