CLECs Hoping for Break from Pro-Incumbent FCC Policies
DALLAS -- Competitive phone companies are eager for a new FCC after suffering eight years of policy favoring incumbent carriers, TW Telecom CEO Larissa Herda said in a keynote late Tuesday at the CompTel show. Competitors survived “one of the most unfriendly regulatory environments possible,” Herda said.
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“For many of us, it’s been like living through a scary reality TV show -- ‘Survivor: FCC.'” The new commission can do much to better promote competition in the business market, she said.
“FCC decisions in the past eight years have only permitted more concentration, greater market power for incumbents, and higher prices paid for customers,” Herda said. Granting Qwest, Verizon and AT&T forbearance from tariffing rules on Ethernet services was a particularly bad move, she said. Ethernet is a “a nascent technology with limited deployments” that has become increasingly valuable to enterprise customers, she said. But by deregulating the service, the FCC “effectively mandated a comprehensive overbuild strategy” for competitors, which is expensive and takes too much time, she said.
In opening remarks, CompTel CEO Jerry James also seemed relieved about the changes at the commission, though he didn’t condemn the last FCC. “We're looking forward to … a more friendly FCC to our competitive sector,” he said.
A national broadband policy shouldn’t ignore business users as it deals with residential gaps, Herda said. Policymakers have “ignored the broadband needs of business customers for far too long,” she said. Bandwidth demand is growing “exponentially,” but access to end-user customers and buildings “is generally constrained” and mostly limited to incumbent facilities, Herda said. Limited access means higher prices and less innovation, she said. Herda urged those in her audience to fight in Washington for “effective regulation” of the special access market, interconnection for IP voice and data services, and a revamp or elimination of the forbearance process.
The FCC should require incumbents to interconnect with competitors for Internet-based services, Herda said. The last commission said competitors should independently seek interconnection agreements with incumbents, but this doesn’t work, she said. “Not only do the incumbents not want to offer competitive providers access to these new technologies, they don’t even want to have a conversation,” Herda said. Competitors have “no leverage to exert -- regulatory, competitive or otherwise.”