This book captures the effects of alternative telecommunications technologies offering access to the switched telephone networks on the marketplace for local telecommunications services. Ingo Vogelsang and Bridger M. Mitchell focus on the local exchange carriers as actors facing new types of competition within the local access and transport areas defined by the 1982 consent decree that divested AT&T of its local operating companies.

Vogelsang and Mitchell directly analyze the most pivotal issues raised by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This book is the first study to evaluate the FCC's landmark order on implementing the local competition provisions of the act.