Cable has uphill road to telco entry.(cable television industry to provide local phone service)

A year of 'negotiation, regulation, litigation' could stand between cable and its provision of local phone service

The telecommunications act may now be the law of the land, but the cable industry is likely to pay millions of dollars in legal fees and spend at least a year in negotiations before seeing the first indications that the local telephone market is truly open to competition.

The industry's focus now shifts to the FCC, which has six months to write a complex set of rules designed to break up the local telephone monopoly for the first time in 100 years.

At the heart of the FCC rulemakings will be regulations that allow competitors to connect their …