Hill Country Telephone Cooperative has a few less opponents in...

p10) because, due to Texas state law restricting the level at which it can raise its rates, it’s losing that large a sum from the FCC’s USF. The loss is associated with the FCC’s quantile regression analysis rate benchmark, implemented last July as part of the FCC’s November 2011 USF order. At the time and in months since, a coalition of Sprint Nextel, tw telecom of Texas and the Texas Cable Association had intervened, providing scrutiny of Hill Country’s petition. But on Jan. 31, the coalition asked to drop its intervention before the PUC (http://xrl.us/boffr8), a request the commission granted Wednesday in an order (http://xrl.us/boffsi). The coalition doesn’t want to stand between PUC staff and Hill Country as they're likely to reach an agreement, it said, despite the coalition’s disagreements with certain Texas regulations. “Section 56.025 [of the Texas Public Utility Regulatory Act] undermines the FCC’s policy determinations and constrains the Commission’s ability to make an independent determination of the extent to which the deliberative conclusions reached by the FCC should be, in effect, countermanded,” the coalition told the PUC. The Texas law allows for companies to seek replacement from the Texas USF of high-cost support money it’s lost federally. The coalition’s still not completely satisfied and said that nothing in recent months “provides the assurance that Texans should be entitled to with respect to the [Texas USF], namely, that they are not being called upon to provide a subsidy where it is not necessary” for Hill Country. But the Texas act “simply precludes the type of investigation that would make that assurance possible,” it said.