Martin Eyes Fall FCC Action on USF Numbers Plan
FCC Chmn. Kevin Martin plans to proceed as soon as the fall on a proposal to change how telecom providers contribute to the Universal Service Fund, he said Mon. after a speech. Martin told reporters he is waiting for a U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., decision on a related universal service issue before teeing up a proposal to replace the revenue-based contribution system with one relying on phone numbers.
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The court is reviewing a 2006 FCC decision to boost the USF by extending contribution mandates to VoIP providers and upping the percentage of revenue wireless carriers pay. It’s best to await that outcome, which may affect the broader contributions issue, Martin said. He spoke at a forum sponsored by the USF by the Numbers Coalition, a broad-based industry group backing Martin’s efforts for a system in which carriers pay a flat fee, based on how many phone numbers they have. A numbers-based plan is “competitively neutral, more stable,” Martin told the audience of mostly numbers plan supporters. “I've long favored numbers” as a substitution for revenue as a basis for contributions, he told the audience.
When a listener asked about fears that a numbers approach would send academic institutions’ USF payments skyrocketing, Martin said there may be a way to ease universities’ fears. For example, he said, the FCC could “distinguish between users” in applying a number-based system. Jeri Semer, CEO of the Assn. for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, earlier had told the audience that a numbers system could raise colleges’ average monthly USF contribution from $1,559 to $14,754. Colleges have many numbers, she said. “A pure numbers-based collection methodology would have major financial, technological and social impact on college campuses,” Semer warned.
Reverse auctions would make it easier to extend broadband service to rural areas, Martin said in answer to reporters’ questions afterward. Now, universal service subsidies go to multiple companies, diluting the money’s impact and making it “harder for any one company to recover its costs” if it were to build out broadband service, he said. After proposing a cap on universal service subsidies, the Federal State Joint Board on Universal Service put out for further comment the idea of using reverse auctions.
Martin shied away from such USF “distribution” issues in his speech to the numbering coalition. He praised the coalition’s assembling of wide support -- AT&T and Verizon, CTIA, NCTA and the VON Coalition among others -- on USF contributions but said he hesitated to discuss distributing the money because he doubted that accord would hold. Under today’s system, it’s impossible to subsidize both broadband services and multiple providers, he later told reporters.
Martin also voiced hesitancy on a bid to use modeling and mapping to aim universal service subsidies at more “granular” areas where costs are highest, an idea forwarded by Embarq, for one. “Modeling works least well in rural areas,” Martin told reporters. Also, regulators “have to be careful” not to “disaggregate rural areas” unless a USF cap has been imposed, he said. Otherwise, the cost of serving “very rural areas” actually could rise, because the cost of serving very rural areas in a telecom company’s territory no longer would be offset by lower-cost towns, he said.
Asked about the Ia. “traffic pumping” dispute (CD May 9 p4), Martin said the FCC has an “obligation” to consider complaints about RLEC access charges since it has stepped in to tell big telecom companies to stop blocking calls to the RLECs.