Industry Rivals Continue to Debate Potential FCC BDS Regulation
Sprint and Verizon pushed business data service regulatory proposals, but cable companies, telcos and unions objected to them, in filings posted Tuesday and Wednesday in docket 16-143. Commissioners may consider BDS action at their Oct. 27 meeting, the tentative agenda…
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for which is due for release Oct. 6. Sprint said the BDS joint proposals of Incompas and Verizon were the "best path" to ensure "non-competitive market conditions" don't hurt business customers and incumbent rivals, including wireless carriers rolling out 5G mobile broadband networks that need more backhaul. AT&T is engaged in an "eleventh-hour effort" to block changes and preserve its "lucrative dominance," said a Sprint filing, which included an extensive overview of "the overwhelming evidence in support" of the Incompas/Verizon framework and separate "backstop remedies." Verizon disputed Comcast arguments the cable company was a BDS "private carrier" (not a “common carrier”) and should be subject to different rules. Verizon said it backed exempting post-2006 Ethernet providers from proposed benchmark regulation. But NCTA, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox and Mediacom said the record showed BDS was "intensely competitive" and provided "no basis" for Incompas/Verizon regulatory proposals. In a meeting with staffers, they urged the FCC to adopt NCTA's proposal to regulate only where companies have market power. CenturyLink said Incompas/Verizon proposals would cut rates in BDS offerings below 50 Mbps and extend them to Ethernet services in noncompetitive areas through benchmark regulation affecting most price-cap ILECs except Verizon, which would see "little, if any, impact." The agency can justify "no more than minimal" reductions to DS1 and DS3 rates based on "X-factor" productivity analysis, said CenturyLink, which said regulation undercut 5G. Frontier Communications and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers urged the FCC not to impose "draconian" ILEC rate cuts that would threaten union jobs in favor of competitors that blocked organized labor and provided lower pay and benefits. Dorsey Hager, executive secretary of the Columbus/Central Ohio Building & Construction Trades Council, asked the FCC to revise proposals that are based on "data that is out of date." Tech Knowledge Director Fred Campbell disagreed that Incompas/Verizon proposals were a compromise, given their increasingly common wireless-oriented interests. Verizon would reap the benefits of lower BDS rates out of region but wouldn't have to lower its own Ethernet rates, he said in a commentary.