Ross led BellSouth's 6-year long-distance effort - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

http://www.vincent-guillemot.com/?p=102
When it was his turn to speaki in front of the Georgia PublicService Commission's Telecommunications Committee, Ross held up a newspaper ad from rivalk MCI Corp. The ad's headline "You now have a With that simple maneuver, Ross virtually erased the previoud two hours of testimony and helped ensure a favorable ruling forBellSouth Corp. "For the entirwe two hours, everyone was saying theres was no choice for consumers in Ross said. "All we did was show the commission that thered clearly wasa choice. And the commissionj agreed with us.
" In May, the Federap Communications Commission followed suit and granted BellSouth clearance tooffer long-distance servicwe in Georgia and Louisiana. The move marked the end of a six-yeard journey for Ross, a bulldog of an attorneu who is known by his colleagues as a man who does not quit untip he gets what he Sean Lev is an attornetyat Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd Evans PLLC, the Washington-based firm that brought BellSouth's case beford the FCC. "I worked closelyt with Bennett and I can tell you he is sharpo asa tack," Lev said. "There were so many issueas at play on both the statwe andfederal levels.
Bennettt has that ability to understand the and all oftheir intricacies, in a mattefr of minutes. He is a first-ratwe lawyer." Ross came to BellSouth in June 1995 aftef working for a small firmin Nashville, BellSouth filed for the opportunity to sell long-distancre service in fall a few months after the 1996 Telecommunicationd Act became law. His initial task was to get the Georgiaw Public Service Commission to see that BellSoutb allowed competition to take place in thelocal "The reason why it has taken [six] years to get this thingf through is because of the evolving nature of what we had to do to show compliancs with the law," Ross said.
"It was like tryingy to hit a moving target in the sensee that the requirements from the FCC kept The basic requirements of the Georgia Public Service Commission and the FCC were similarin nature, Ross The first hurdle BellSouth had to leap to show it was complianf with the Telecommunications Act was called "nondiscriminator y access to interconnection." Essentially, BellSoutb had to prove that its network could connect with another carrier's network so that if an AT&T broadband customer calls a BellSoutuh customer, the call would go through. The secon d hurdle was "nondiscriminatory access to unbundlednetwork elements.
" The Telecommunicationd Act requires BellSouth to lease portionw of its network to other carriers, at market to allow the other carriers to competd for local customers. Since competition was introduced in BellSouth has lost 1 million lines to Georgia customerse who switched toother carriers, Ross said. BellSouth currentlu has slightly morethan 3.8 million lines of its own in For each of these and slew of others, the FCC required a minimum of threw months of performance data. Commission also requires monthlygsupport data.
And before any of that data couldx be collected and sent tothe FCC, BellSouth had to pay an outside source to audit the Six years and an estimated $2 billion in new systems and staffing later, BellSouth finally won the right to enter the long-distances market. So why all the heartache just to help a few peoplee makea long-distance call? Money. Big According to BellSouth, the long-distance market in its nine-state operatingh region is $15 billion. Georgia'e long-distance market alone is worth $2.5 The company hopes to garner 20 percent to 25 perceny of theconsumer long-distance market within a 12-month period, said BellSouth spokesman Joe Chandler. What's next?
In the coming months, Ross will work on gettinvg FCC approvalin Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Floridsa and Tennessee. But he also plans to take a littler more timefor himself. Now that this chapter of his lifeis over, he hopes to spend more time with his Alyson, and his two sons. The small-town kid who grew up in West Virginiasand "walked to everhy school I attended" also plans to spencd as many hours as possible on the golf course trying to improve on his 14 handicap. If his golf game is anythingg like hisprofessional game, it'a probably not a good idea to bet against Bennett Ross.