As a veteran of the local competition wars of the 1990s I can tell you that unless you are prepared to re-impose a line of business restriction on the Bell Companies, you cannot avoid intrusive regulation. When you have a common infrastructure (network, OSS, personnel, information) supporting multiple activities you may as well debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin because the "proper" allocation of costs to each of these activities is a value judgement. Without assigning a cost to each of these activities you can't hope to get to the model of open entry and unbundled access. And it is a little too early to tout the success of these overseas jurisdictions. Relying on your primary competitor for your critical input is hardly a recipe for success. What is lost in the review of these overseas models is the daily disputes between the incumbent and the competitors over the terms of access, provisioning, billing, etc. These disputes result in the proverbial "death of a thousand cuts" for competitors. I think policy makers in this country got regulatory fatigue and tired of refereeing inter-carrier disputes. They saw inter-modal competition as a much cleaner solution. In many respects they are correct, but the problem has been in their execution. They allowed too much consolidation. They eliminated too much unbundling and open access. And they failed to adapt their regulations and bureaucracies to a multi-carrier environment. There is still hope that this country will get it right. A baseball-style, best and final offer arbitration process for inter-carrier disputes combined with the reform of inter-carrier compensation and allowing competitors access to rights of way on the same terms and conditions as the incumbents would go a long ways towards stimulating investment in alternative last mile facilities.