Interesting question. My rural ILEC is part owner of the local VZW system, so I'll ask them when I see them. I would guess they probably pay VZ since transit is so cheap, but Time-Warner has fiber plant that they sell capacity on, and there's a fiber ring run by a bunch of rural ILECs.
Doesn't seem cost effective, particularly when you consider that the wireless carrier's (it's AT&T) switch handles prefixes in something like two dozen different rate centers, some of which are more than 75 miles away from Syracuse.
Illustrative story: my numbers are in the Ithaca rate center, which is in the Syracuse LATA. Nearby Burdett, where the ILEC is Empire Telephone, is a local call to Ithaca, even though it's in the Binghamton LATA. But the last time I checked, if you're in Burdett and you call a non-Verizon Ithaca number, Empire will charge you for an inter-LATA toll call. They have EAS trunks that go to a VZ switch in Ithaca, but they don't have trunks to Syracuse (their toll trunks go to Binghamton) and they're too cheap or too dim to arrange for transit through VZ to the CLECs. Yes, this is totally wrong, but it's not the only totally wrong thing about Empire Tel. One time I called
411 from one of their payphones and I think I got the owner's 14 year old daughter with a local phonebook.Other illustrative story: AT&T, Sprint, and Nextel all have towers on our local water tower (I negotiated the leases) and I know that they all rent T1s or HDLC from the local telco. If they don't do their own backhaul from cell sites, how likely are they to do backhaul from random switches?
R's, John