I hope all my readers out in the blogosphere (are we still using that term?) aren’t tired of hearing my conspiracy theories about the link between telco union worker contracts and PBT, because here I go again.

You may recall that last week I blogged about how a source at Telco Systems told me one of the driving factors of PBT – which from a network management standpoint looks like legacy SONET/SDH – is likely telco contracts with union workers that stipulate those employees can’t work on certain technologies. In that piece, I noted that both BT and Verizon denied this was the case; the Communications Workers of America (CWA) failed to return my calls on the matter; and that Nortel hadn’t heard this angle to the issue.

This week Greg Gum, vice president marketing and business development at ANDA Networks and a former US WEST and Qwest guy, told me that while he’s uncertain about wording in contracts union workers have with the large telcos today, there was such wording in union contracts in the not-to-distant past.

“I don’t know what the union contracts read today because it’s been now five or six years since I’ve been involved in CWA,” said Gum. “But I do recall that there were specific restrictions, depending upon which union you’re working with, and CWA was one of them, and there was some restriction on their ability to work with higher – Layer 3 and above – types of gear. Yup. And anything that gets protocol conversion was considered an IP-based service, therefore if it was doing Layer 3 or above protocol conversion that was basically under the guise of the old information services provider act.”

Gum continued: “Most of the contracts, and I was privy to this five or six years ago when we were acquired by Qwest, there was fair amount of negotiation that went on with the unions to apply a different level of let’s say job or skill level, functional level, so folks would do those types of IP-based services because obviously the Internet was changing the network and we had to modify our schemas ...”

While Gum, who said ANDA Networks is a PBT supporter, said he hasn’t heard any discussion about potential union restrictions being a driver for PBT, he added: “Obviously, [companies like BT and Verizon are] under cost control, so they’re going to look at the most economical way to do it.”