Why Not COMPTEL?

A piece of news hit me that just adds to the bad taste that COMPTEL leaves in my mouth. Here's an organization that is mainly composed of CLEC's. Since MCI and AT&T were acquired by RBOC's all teeth have left the building. I can't think of a single COMPTEL FCC or court victory. The big one was supposed to be Brand-X, but that turned out to be a huge loss.

This morning a CLEC client pointed out all the benefits that he gets from NRTC Coop and I am astounded.

So the news item was about VON. "will host a CTO Summit at which leading competitive service providers will develop a road map for creating a nationwide IP-based peering fabric that will bypass the legacy PSTN and support advanced services such as HD voice.....Committed to attending so far are Alteva, Telesphere, Simple Signal, Callis Communications, ISN Telcom, Broadcore, Global IP Solutions and Consolidated Technologies" as well as Broadsoft and Polycom, vendors for most of those attending.

This isn't really ground breaking because there are IP Peers like Arbinet and Stealth's VPF. But it's the first time that the ITSP's decided to start their own. And I have to wonder why COMPTEL wasn't behind this a couple of years ago. COMPTEL needs to start thinking of ways to add value to its membership, instead of just ways to make it really expensive to network with each other.