Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) is a regulatory term in telecommunications for the local telephone company.
In the United States, wireline telephone companies are divided into two large categories: long distance (interexchange carrier, or IXCs) and local (local exchange carrier, or LECs). This structure is a result of 1984 divestiture of then-regulated monopoly carrier American Telephone & Telegraph. Local telephone companies at the time of the divestiture are also known as Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILEC).
The divestiture created local exchange carriers for the management of local telephone lines and switches, and provisioning of local phone services within their business area, as well as the long distance calls originating or terminating in their business area. The vast majority of the United States are served by LECs called Baby Bells, or RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies). The rest of the United States, most commonly in rural or outlying suburban areas, are served by independent LECs, known in the industry simply as the "independents." Although independent companies typically serve these areas, RBOC LECs still have vast territories of low population density regions of the country. Therefore independents generally exist as pockets of territory within a greater RBOC region. Popular independents are Frontier Communications, and Windstream Communications.
Local calls are defined as calls originating and terminating within a local access and transport area (LATA) which is defined by the Federal Communications Commission. All the Baby Bells, as well as other LECs, typically operate businesses in more than one LATA yet their services of local telephone calls are still defined by LATA boundaries, not their business areas.
Read more about Local Exchange Carrier: Residential Local Exchange Services, Duties
Famous quotes containing the words local, exchange and/or carrier:
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better.”
—native American belief, quoted by D. Jenness in “The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River,” Bulletin no. 133, Bureau of American Ethnology (1943)