Industry Endorses FCC Draft on 911 Fee Parity for VoIP, TDM Phone Services
Industry groups representing telcos, cable companies and telecom service bundlers endorsed an FCC draft declaratory ruling to ensure 911 regulatory fee parity between VoIP and functionally equivalent traditional phone services, in interviews last week. Commissioners will vote on the draft at Friday's meeting (see 1910040053). The ruling, on docket 19-44, is an attempt to answer a referral from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama on litigation between AT&T's BellSouth and some 911 districts (see 1909110027).
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USTelecom isn't proposing any changes, said Mike Saperstein, vice president-policy and advocacy. "We are pleased to see a serial litigant will not win the day on this." Saperstein said the Alabama districts wanted to charge a per-number fee from businesses using VoIP rather than a fee on dial-out capacity as with TDM service. "A company may have purchased 100 phone numbers but have the ability at any one time to only dial out 23," he explained.
"The FCC got it exactly right," said Jennifer McKee, NCTA vice president. VoIP typically offers more numbers than outbound lines, and some state statutes ask VoIP users to pay more than equitable, she said. "Some companies have phones in every office, but often those phones are used internally." NCTA didn't ask for changes to the draft: "We're happy to tell the FCC when they do something right."
The Cloud Communications Alliance "would not seek any changes," said outside counsel Michael Pryor. "That's the ruling we advocated." State governments should have leeway, he said, but "what they can't do is violate a 911 fee statute on fee parity with traditional phone services." He's pleased the declaratory ruling would render unlawful imposition of E-911 fees that would result in a charge above that on wireline phone services.
Brannon Buck of Badham & Buck, which represents four Alabama 911 districts in the litigation against BellSouth, said Friday that counsel was analyzing the impact the ruling would have on the 911 districts and wasn't ready to propose changes. Litigation hadn't reached discovery, he said, so attorneys haven't worked up a dollar amount for retroactive fees BellSouth would need to give the districts for fees it hadn't paid before October 2013 if the case proves successful, he said.
"There's chronic underfunding for 911 districts," Buck said. "The districts are just trying to enforce laws that were on the books before October 2013."
Emergency services depend on 911 fees in most of the country, said Richard Muscat, director-regulatory affairs for the Bexar Metro 9-1-1 Network in central Texas. "Wireless is growing, and wireline is leveling off," he said. "Getting both right is important to getting properly funded 911 service."
Muscat, who works for 60 to 70 districts, said the draft ruling "seemed very consistent with what we were trying to do in Texas, to find the right equivalency" between fees for VoIP and TDM business services. "We've had a rule in place for years." He said the network came up with a table of estimations "because they are slightly different technologies." It's not a perfect comparison, he said. "But there shouldn't be wide discrepancies. We do either by channelized lines or phone numbers. But in the future, there may be something else that becomes a better proxy than telephone numbers as technology and IP systems change."
If the market moves to broadband-only, app-based voice services, there may no longer be fees to fund 911 services, Muscat cautioned. "The risk is not keeping an eye on it to get it right." He said the FCC may need to revisit the matter in one to three years. But as for the current draft, Muscat said, "I don't see anything in the order that makes me concerned."
Monday, the Supreme Court said it won’t hear Minnesota’s appeal of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal decision that VoIP is an information service exempt from state regulation (see 1910210059).