Competitors Press FCC to Regulate Incumbent Telco BDS Prices, Practices

DS1 and DS3 price caps, and (2) restrict the term of circuit-specific plans they can offer in areas deemed not competitive. The agency should also extend its prohibition on "all-or-nothing" tariff conditions to all ILEC BDS contracts in noncompetitive areas, said an EarthLink filing posted Friday in docket 16-143 on a meeting with Wireline Bureau officials. It said ILECs should be barred from doing what Verizon did to comply with a recent tariff order (see 1607150062), in which it modified all-or-nothing provisions to permit customers to designate circuits they want included in a discount plan by assigning them to a specific access customer name abbreviation. "Requiring customers to elect a discount plan at the ACNA level is overly burdensome because it is costly and difficult to switch circuits between ACNAs," EarthLink said. Instead, the FCC should require ILECs to permit customers to designate discounted circuits by using "Access Service Requests," and particularly the "Variable Term Agreement" field on the ASR form, which would be "easy to administer," EarthLink said. It also urged the FCC to require ILECs to allow customers to count Ethernet purchases toward TDM volume commitments, and to limit the term of volume plans to one year in noncompetitive areas. Level 3 urged the FCC to classify (1) all BDS offerings of 100 Mbps and below as noncompetitive, (2) all BDS offerings above 1 Gbps as competitive and (3) BDS offerings between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps as competitive where criteria in a market competition test are met, including having four or more providers deploying connections in a census block. Sprint recommended the commission presume that BDS products providing 50 Mbps or below aren't competitive with a market test for offerings above that. TDS Metrocom said "AT&T’s price squeeze practices continue." TDS urged the FCC to adopt "a wholesale-retail rule" for Ethernet service to prevent telcos from charging CLECs more for wholesale access than they do business customers for retail service. The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission expressed concern about cable filings acknowledging undercounts of locations their BDS services could reach. The WUTC urged the FCC to incorporate the new information into updated market analysis before regulating. FCC staff and a consultant said recently the new cable data didn't change their basic analysis (see 1606290045).