Smaller LECs Seek More Time, Long Comment Cycle for Access Charge NPRM
A draft FCC NPRM on wireline phone charges is stirring some industry concerns, stakeholders said. Small, rural LECs may have different interests than ILECs owned by national companies in a proposed FCC rule to change the way wireline voice services are billed, said NTCA Senior Vice President-Industry Affairs and Business Development Mike Romano in an interview. Commissioners vote Tuesday on a draft NPRM on docket 20-71 to determine whether the agency should prohibit telcos from assessing certain access charges as separate line items once the FCC mandates they're detariffed (see 2003100065).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
USTelecom sees the FCC addressing this as a matter of competitive fairness, said Vice President-Policy and Advocacy Mike Saperstein. LECs must follow restrictive federal pricing regulations that other voice providers don't, he said. The new rules would let incumbents price more competitively and flexibly to react to market conditions. "The percentage of ILEC switched voice lines has diminished greatly" to about 11% of U.S. households, he said. USTelecom wants to clarify truth-in-billing rules so companies don't run afoul of them, and to examine the interplay between state and federal billing rules.
NTCA wants the FCC to take a step back and consider potential implications for RLECs, Romano said. "This would reshape how customers pay for voice service." If a small carrier charges $29.50 monthly plus $9.50 in surcharges now, the draft would propose they could no longer assess the surcharges as line items on a bill. Romano said raising the bill by $9.50 "might be confusing to the customer and has implications for cost recovery" as some states may preclude such a rate hike. NTCA wants the NPRM to ask additional questions on whether a rule change could make the surcharge itemization changes permissible rather than mandatory. A higher percentage of customers at smaller carriers tend to continue to buy landline phone service than at larger companies, Romano said.
Incompas wants a four-month comment period. "Consider a much longer timeframe -- no shorter than a 90/30 comment reply period," asked General Counsel Angie Kronenberg in a filing. "It is appropriate for the Commission to acknowledge the extraordinary circumstances that we are in as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and to send a message to those it regulates that they should be focused on their employees, network operations, and customers." The proposed comment cycle is 30 days for comments, 15 for replies. The association didn't comment Thursday, nor did the FCC.
Romano said a delay in any order resulting from the NPRM would make sense from a customer standpoint, too. "Customers don't need any more confusion in their lives," he said. "Part of our advocacy is certainly the commission shouldn't take action on this for quite some time because there are bigger fish to fry."