Wireline Carriers Condemn FeatureGroup Plea for Reconsideration
Don’t reconsider a FeatureGroup IP forbearance petition on VoIP access charges, major incumbent wireline carriers urged the FCC. FeatureGroup, a competitive local exchange carrier serving VoIP providers, is challenging a January order denying the company forbearance relief (CD Feb 24 p9). The company wants a ruling that access charges don’t apply to Internet-based traffic that interconnects with carriers on the public switched telephone network. In opposition filings last week, AT&T, Verizon, Embarq and four rural carrier associations said the FCC was right to deny relief.
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The forbearance petition suffered from “a litany of procedural and substantive defects,” and if granted would have created uncertainty and undermined fair competition, AT&T said. FeatureGroup’s reconsideration petition calls the FCC and opponents names, but raises no “relevant new facts” nor “any legitimate errors in the Commission’s legal conclusions,” the carrier said.
The FCC should address IP-PSTN access charges in a separate rulemaking, said the National Exchange Carrier Association, National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance and the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies. The FCC should rule that access charges apply to all interexchange voice traffic terminating on the PSTN, regardless of the technology used to originate the call, they said in a joint filing. The agency should also rule that FeatureGroup and other CLECs serving VoIP providers “are responsible for payment of resulting intercarrier compensation obligations, including access charges,” they said.
It’s time for the regulator to issue a clear rule that access charges apply, agreed Embarq. “Such an explicit statement is appropriate to reduce disputes and discourage abuses by parties like FeatureGroup IP.”
AT&T rejected a FeatureGroup claim that the big telco was improperly using the forbearance order as a weapon in a Texas dispute between the companies over $7.5 million in unpaid access charges. In the reconsideration petition, FeatureGroup said AT&T told the Texas Public Utilities Commission that it should view the order as the FCC’s conclusion that access charges are due, even though the FCC made no decision on current compensation rules. Not exactly, AT&T said. It told the PUC that “the same logic, as well as the same potential consumer and competitive harms” that the FCC considered, show “the importance of interpreting the parties’ interconnection agreement to require compensation.” But AT&T explicitly told the PUC that “the FCC order does not determine the issues before the Texas Commission,” it said.
Whatever AT&T told the PUC, it doesn’t make a valid claim for reconsideration, Verizon said. “Even assuming FeatureGroup IP were correct that AT&T Texas’s letter mischaracterized the effect of the Order … a private party’s description of a Commission ruling provides no basis for reconsideration of the substance of that ruling,” Verizon said. “Nothing a private party says can change the content of the Order, and reconsideration is limited to challenges to that content: to the Commission’s actual ‘findings of fact and/or conclusions of law.'”