Sprint Nextel submitted a plan at the FCC offering its version of...

equitably,” Sprint said Wednesday. It’s also “the only plan that can be implemented immediately,” said Sprint Nextel General Counsel Len Kennedy. Adopting the plan would cut annual carrier contributions $3.1 billion annually, Sprint said, estimating that carriers now contribute $4.6 billion yearly. The plan would drop the contribution rate to 6 percent from 11.3 percent, Sprint said. High-cost support for competitive eligible telecom carriers would drop 85 percent, Sprint said. Small rural incumbent local exchange carriers’ share of high-cost support would rise to 81 percent from 41 percent, Sprint said. The plan would let incumbents replace “much of the high-cost support with new service revenue obtained by increasing in modest increments the federal cap on subscriber line charges,” Sprint said. The Sprint plan “works largely within current FCC rules and can be easily administered,” the company said in a letter to the FCC. The plan has three components, it said. The first would raise SLC caps for all ILECs and reduce their high-cost support by the same sum. The second would recalculate required contributions to the High-Cost Loop Support and Local Switching Support funds by “consolidating study areas of holding companies with more than one million ILEC lines initially at the state level and later statewide.” The final component “caps or ends all high-cost support in a study area depending upon the level of CETC penetration.” Alltel lauded the Sprint plan. “Sprint’s recognition for the continuing need for technological-neutrality in universal service is noteworthy,” a spokesman said. “We look forward to working with Sprint on how best to achieve fair and equitable long term universal service reform.” Other carriers and telecom groups we contacted didn’t comment by our deadline.