I wasn't terribly surprised to learn the United States is trailing Europe when it comes to promoting competition. It has become common knowledge that greater competition exists in markets such as the United Kingdom, where the incumbent was forced to separate wholesale and retail units, and in other countries such as France, where IPTV is a competitive field, than here in the U.S.

Comptel confirmed that status last week when it released a competitive scorecard, based on the way the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) measures competition on that continent. It is possible to dismiss the scorecard as the work of a competitive service provider's lobbying group, but that wouldn't be wise. Most of the scorecard results are based on data that is largely objective and hard to simply ignore.

At the same time, there are growing concerns that decommissioning -- and in some cases, removing -- copper lines from the network as they are replaced by fiber threatens competition even further. Competitive service providers are already asking the FCC to take action, or at least clarify, whether AT&T and Verizon can remove copper lines from service once they've deployed fiber optic cable that they don't have to share with competitors.

These concerns are not to be confused with the recent complaints of some residential customers that Verizon has removed their copper access lines as it turned up its FiOS service, limiting customers' ability to go back to cheaper copper-based service in the future. These latest complaints are less viable -- Verizon has said it is only removing aerial copper wires when they are not needed and will restring copper if the customer requests it. For obvious reasons, the company doesn't want to have to maintain two separate networks, especially since it is investing billions to deploy fiber.

The competitive service providers have the more important point -- if incumbents can retire copper lines that connect central offices to remote terminals, they have effectively prevented competition to those areas. And as bonding technology makes it possible to deliver larger amounts of bandwidth over longer distances using copper, it would not seem to be the time to throw that asset away.

At the same time, incumbents can argue they shouldn't be forced to maintain two separate networks just to accommodate potential future plans of their competition.

This is the kind of complex issue on which the FCC should be taking action. It's not going to get the kind of attention that Net neutrality debates will, but in the long run could have as much impact. As the Comptel scorecard showed, however, swift response to industry disputes is not a hallmark of the U.S. regulatory process -- which is one reason we are not scoring high on the competitive scale.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.