Washington, D.C. -- The Competitive Telecommunications Association (CompTel), yesterday warned the New York Public Service Commission that Bell Atlantic - New York (BA-NY) has yet to satisfy many of the most basic requirements set forth in Section 271 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and that BA-NY's Pre-filing Statement does not and cannot support any conclusion that the local market is competitive.

In an affidavit filed with the Commission, the association said that BA-NY has made no attempts to prove that it has met the Section 271 requirements of the Act and the 14-point competitive checklist designed to assure local competition exists before Bell entry into long distance.

A host of unresolved problems continue to plague companies who try to compete with BA-NY, according to CompTel, and many involve the operations support systems (OSS). Flaws in these critical functions have been identified most recently by KPMG Peat Marwick, which tested BA-NY's OSS procedures and systems.

CompTel believes that BA-NY should demonstrate that it has corrected these problems before it is allowed to enter long distance and it also should be required to provide the New York Commission with at least four months of data from actual commercial usage showing satisfactory performance.

"Because BA-NY's compliance is still based on unfulfilled promises to a great extent (particularly with respect to OSS), a Commission conclusion that BA-NY has satisfied the checklist would be based on a moving target..," CompTel said.

CompTel also underscored the importance of the Department of Justice's requirement that a local market be deemed "irreversibly open to competition." According to CompTel, this standard cannot be applied to New York's local exchange market until the New York Commission establishes and implements both meaningful performance standards and effective enforcement mechanisms to prevent "backsliding" once the incentive of long distance entry is gone. In NY, CompTel said these mechanisms are still being developed--and the mechanisms proposed by BA-NY are entirely inadequate and actually discriminate among new competitors' market entry methods. Further, CompTel said BA-NY's proposed mechanisms also downplay important performance standards and impose overly burdensome monitoring obligations for competitors.

CompTel charged that BA-NY continues to ignore the fact that the Supreme Court has reinstated the FCC's rules barring incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) from imposing restrictions on combinations of unbundled network elements (UNEs) and prohibiting them from separating existing combinations of network elements unless requested to do so. Regardless, BA-NY insists on separating network elements for certain services, facilities, customers, and locations as it deems appropriate -- an approach that is clearly impermissible under the FCC's rules.

CompTel has stated repeatedly that restrictions on expanded extended link (EEL) are unlawful, and that such restrictions will stifle technological advancement as well as hamstring competitors' ability to use innovative and efficient network configurations. Noting that no restrictions can lawfully be placed on a competitor's use of network elements, CompTel urged the New York Commission to require BA-NY to remove the restrictions on its EEL offering before deciding that BA-NY has met its obligations under the Act and Section 271 and should be allowed to enter the interLATA market in New York.