Rural carriers asked Congress to intervene in FCC efforts to over...
Rural carriers asked Congress to intervene in FCC efforts to overhaul intercarrier compensation. In a scathing letter to House and Senate members, CEO Michael Brunner of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association condemned a $0.0007 uniform terminating access rate proposed…
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for all traffic by AT&T, Verizon and others. The agency is “seriously considering” the proposal, which Brunner predicts would “wrongly relieve communications industry titans… of more than $8 billion in annual access and intercarrier compensation responsibilities,” he said: “For rural carriers alone, this disruption could jeopardize more than $2 billion” annually. The plan also would affect rural telecom lenders, which hold $9.1 billion total in loans, he said. Brunner condemned the idea of using the Universal Service Fund to replace carriers’ lost access revenue. USF “has already been strained by unbridled program growth resulting from regulatory lapses,” he said.