Windstream, Allies Say CenturyLink's Own Data Undercut Its BDS Arguments

claims that DS1 and DS3 service costs had increased. "This conclusion uses an inflated view of costs and completely ignores accompanying increases in revenues -- which are significantly outstripping costs (even as alleged by CenturyLink) and show that incumbent LEC BDS operations require greater commission oversight," said a Windstream filing Thursday in FCC docket 16-143. Windstream said CenturyLink data show that its "BDS revenue increases in recent years far exceed its supposed BDS cost increases," with net operating income per circuit rising by 47 percent over four years. “CenturyLink is crying a river of crocodile tears in hopes it can continue floating its boatload of BDS profits," said a release from the Broadband Coalition (comprised of EarthLink, Level 3 and Windstream). CenturyLink emailed in response: “Windstream and the Broadband Coalition are comparing apples and oranges by looking at all of our ILEC costs and revenues, but dividing them by special access circuits alone and ignoring all of our residential customers.” Replying to prior comments in the BDS docket, consultant Jonathan Baker made a detailed filing on behalf of Level 3 and Windstream, saying the presence of one nearby rival is insufficient to constrain the BDS prices of ILECs with market power. The Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee disputed it had made any accounting proposal similar to what AT&T alleged in a previous filing, but the group fleshed out its views on price cap rules. "If these requirements are what AT&T was attempting to target in its ex parte filing, then its hyperbolic mischaracterization of them merely confirms that Ad Hoc was correct to identify them as effective measures for incenting BDS providers to charge rates consistent with the Commission’s price caps rules," said an Ad Hoc letter. Former Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., now chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, wrote a commentary saying competition is the best way to promote BDS deployment and innovation. "Unjustified" FCC regulation that ignores economic realities would cause a BDS "investment depression," he wrote. Possible "benchmark" regulation would harm competitive fiber providers in their efforts to deploy new fiber networks, including for mobile backhaul, said a Uniti Fiber filing on meetings with aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioners Mike O'Rielly, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel.