The "problem" was that ILECs never followed the rules and regulators never punished them for that. If a CLEC wanted to add a customer, they got a schedule for 3 weeks, even though the ILEC would do it in less than a week if the customer were signing up with them. Anyway, the schedule was also a fiction, because the ILEC would come up with half a dozen reasons to delay it to 5 weeks. We're not talking about a technician visiting a customer's house. We're talking about a couple of switches thrown in a central office, an operation that would take less than a minute. How could anyone attract new customers in such a situation? That is why all CLECs went bust or were acquired for pennies on the dollar.

In other nations, with functioning regulation, unbundling was considered unworkable so they required that a separate entity would own the local loop.