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The consultation findings require BT to offer an unmetered wholesale Single Tandem Flat Rate Internet Access Call Origination ('Single Tandem FRIACO') service to Other Licensed Operators (OLOs) who provide telecommunications services to, among others, UK Internet Service Providers. Previously OFTEL had mandated wholesale FRIACO services from OLOs' telecommunications backbones to BT's Direct Local Exchanges (DLEs) of which there are approximately 740 in the United Kingdom. The problem most OLOs faced was that they connected to relatively few DLEs, connecting instead mainly with the 74 or so BT Digital Main Switching Units (DMSUs). To bridge the gap BT offered Hybrid FRIACO which charged on a metered basis for the transport of calls between DLEs and DMSUs; the costs and conditions of Hybrid FRIACO were so onerous that no OLO was interested. Because of these problems only one major ISP, AOL UK, was able to offer FRIACO-based unmetered Internet access by working with a variety of OLOs to put together AOL Flat Rate which gives unmetered Internet access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for £15pcm. The results of the Consultation are that FRIACO Hybrid has been supplanted by Single Tandem FRIACO which will allow many OLOs to offer unmetered services to ISPs from 1 February 2001 onwards. The flat rate charge to OLOs for Single Tandem FRIACO will be the same as for FRIACO, but participating OLOs will also be expected to pay half of the cost of building out an overlay network to handle the IP traffic generated between DLEs and DMSUs. As an immediate measure to remove traffic from BT's PSTN network to its IP network BT will be required to connect DLEs to those DMSUs which are next to them; we can only wonder why BT has not already done this on its own. Longer term, OLOs will be expected to build out their networks to connect at DLEs rather than DMSUs, something which is already being done by them in preparation for local loop unbundling (LLU) and, to a lesser degree, by those which are involved in BT SurfTime.
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