IPCS Providers and Sheriffs Support FCC Bureau's Delay of Prison-Calling Rules
Incarcerated people’s communications service (IPCS) providers and some public safety groups are leaning on the FCC not to rescind a Wireline Bureau order delaying some prison-calling deadlines until April 1, 2027. In a surprise move, the bureau postponed implementation deadlines that took effect in January and had been approved by commissioners last year (see 2506300068).
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!
Advocates of prisoners and prisoners' families filed an application for review of the order, saying it “contradicts Congress’s directives” in the Martha Wright-Reed Act (MWRA), reviving “four-year-old rate caps.” Oppositions were posted Friday and Tuesday in docket 23-62.
Thousands of people with loved ones in prison also asked the FCC to rethink the delay, which they portray as a giveaway to companies that have long overcharged for connections. One advocate previously called the public comments “the tip of an iceberg of misery” and said the delay was “unspeakably cruel” (see 2507100061).
Securus, a leading IPCS provider, said the bureau acted based on “new evidence” demonstrating that the rule change “threatened to cause (and in some cases has already led to) a reduction in IPCS services for incarcerated people.” The provider argued that the delay was a “well-reasoned response to evidence that the 2024 IPCS Order did not foresee.”
Securus also said the bureau order followed the letter of the law, arguing that the MWRA “required the Commission to promulgate regulations within a specific window -- which the 2024 IPCS Order did -- but left to the Commission the decision of when those rules should take effect.”
Pay Tel, another provider, said the 2024 reforms “went too-fast and too-far.” Given the “unintended detrimental effects, the Bureau rightly and reasonably acted to temporarily extend certain compliance deadlines promulgated in the 2024 IPCS Order, including revised rate caps, the site commission prohibition, and per-minute pricing rules.”
The waiver order was justified, agreed the National Sheriffs’ Association. “Substantial record evidence supports the Bureau's decision, including facility service eliminations, provider cessation of IPCS at seven facilities, and technical challenges requiring new billing platforms with deployment not possible before April 2026,” the sheriffs group said. The 24-month deadline in the MWRA, which passed Jan. 5, should be seen as “guidance rather than a mandatory constraint on agency authority.”
IPCS provider NCIC said the waiver order doesn’t “make any substantive changes to the rules adopted in the 2024 Report and Order.” The bureau “simply extended the deadline for IPCS providers to come into compliance with the new regulations, a practice that is commonly carried out at the Bureau level, and which does not violate the Administrative Procedure Act.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr voted in favor of the order as a commissioner with a partial concurrence, but his statement at the time hinted at some of the bureau's reasoning for delaying implementation. “As the item itself acknowledges, at least some IPCS providers will likely lose money for every call made under the new rules,” Carr said then. It’s “in nobody’s interest for these providers to exit the market, or for smaller facilities to go unserved because the economics no longer make sense.”