Local exchange carrier

Local exchange carriers (or LECs) are regulatory terms for local telephone or communications companies. The Bell System Breakup made ILECs (The Incumbent and Local Exchange Carriers). The vast majority for the United States have service with LECs called the Baby Bells. The rest of the United States have LECs who perform servces mainly in rural regions and suburban areas. Two examples for such are the independent LECs Windstream Holdings and Brightspeed.

Duties

The local exchanges carriers have the following tasks and missions:

• The resale – The task to not prohibit and to not impose any unreasonable or discriminatory conditions or limitations on resales of any telecommunications services.
• Number portability – A task to provide, to the extents that are feasible, number portability in line with requirements prescribed by the Federal Communications Commission.
• The dialing parity – The job to have dialing parity for competing providers of telephone exchange and toll service plus the duty to all all such providers to have nondiscriminatory access to telephone numbers, operator services, directory assistance and directory listing with no unreasonable dialing delays.
• Access to right-of-way – The job to afford access to the poles, ducts, conduits and rights-of-way of such carrier to competing providers of telecommunications services on rates, terms and conditions that are consistent with section 224.
• Reciprocal compensation – The job to set up reciprocal compensation arrangements for the transport or termination of telecommunications.