Pennsylvania residents could see major changes to their wireline services in the state if the Legislature votes for a bill that would eliminate carrier of last resort obligations (COLR) for local exchange carriers in competitive areas and limit the USF, said industry, two Pennsylvania Public Utility commissioners, the state’s consumer advocate and other interested parties at a House Consumer Affairs Committee hearing Thursday. House Bill 1608, sponsored by Rep. Warren Kampf (R), would remove the PUC’s oversight of ILECs, and it would allows ILECs to self-declare whole exchanges as competitive. The bill would end the state’s USF on Jan. 1, 2019, and prevent the PUC from raising the amount of money contributed to the fund each year.
NARUC formally adopted resolutions on federalism and surveillance at the closing session of its annual meeting Wednesday. The resolution on federalism says cooperation and collaboration between state and federal regulators is the best way to ensure communications services remain universally available, affordable and reasonably comparable across the country. Approval marked the end of a yearlong effort to produce an update of a white paper on federalism and telecom in the 21st century. The resolution passed with small grammatical changes and a new clause to recommend that states retain a “prominent role in all decisions related to USF,” added by the telecom committee Monday (http://bit.ly/1h2MSEs). The resolution on government surveillance was significantly changed in committee to say telecom carriers have a obligation to protect customer proprietary network information (CD Nov 19 p13). The staff subcommittee, composed of state commission staff, significantly changed a resolution on cramming to include cramming and porting in its Sunday meeting, but it decided to recommend it to the telecom committee, made up of state commissioners (CD Nov 19 p11). The telecom committee decided to table the resolution until its February meeting in Washington, D.C. for further discussion.
DENVER -- The three-judge panel that heard an FCC USF case left attorneys impressed with its preparation for the oral argument, the attorneys said in interviews afterward. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday heard a challenge of the FCC 2011 Connect America Fund order, which revamped the rules of the $4.5 billion-a-year fund and set intercarrier compensation on a path toward bill-and-keep (CD Nov 20 p2). “They were engaged,” said Stinson Morrison attorney Harvey Reiter, who argued that the revamp of the USF and intercarrier compensation rules unlawfully hurt his rural CLEC clients. “They followed everything. I was amazed that they could jump from one issue to another. I think the court was pretty active.” But another attorney predicted a possible Supreme Court challenge if the 10th Circuit follows an irrelevant “tangent” in upholding the intercarrier compensation rules.
The IP transition may herald changes and an end to certain aspects of common carriage regulation, panelists said Wednesday at an event in Washington hosted by the Progressive Policy Institute. Platform competition now emerging may cause certain common carrier obligations to “melt away,” said Navigant Economics Managing Director Hal Singer. “Imposing these obligations when they're not necessary isn’t innocuous -- it’s very, very harmful.” A certain amount of competition must presage such melting away of obligations, he said, an area where the FCC could be of more help in producing data. Singer’s clients have included AT&T.
DENVER -- Judges seemed generally receptive Tuesday to FCC arguments that the agency acted reasonably when it implemented its landmark 2011 Connect America Fund order. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel spent several hours hearing challenges to the order, which rewrote the $4.5 billion USF and set intercarrier compensation on a path toward bill and keep. As judges told challengers that ambiguous terms in the Telecom Act should be resolved in favor of reasonable FCC interpretation, challengers responded either that the terms weren’t ambiguous or the interpretation wasn’t reasonable.
ORLANDO -- The NARUC Telecom Committee approved resolutions on federalism and surveillance at its meeting Monday. The federalism resolution approved a yearlong effort to update a paper on federalism and how the states interact with the FCC and the industry. The surveillance resolution, introduced by Indiana Utility Regulatory Commissioner Larry Landis, was also passed by the committee with major changes to reflect concern that customer proprietary network information (CPNI) restrictions are being breached by telco cooperation with the National Security Agency. All NARUC commissioners will vote on the resolutions at the closing session Wednesday.
Two of the three judges set to hear a challenge Tuesday of the FCC Connect America Fund order are no strangers to telecom appeals. Judge Jerome Holmes of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled for the FCC in a case challenging its denial of a forbearance petition. Chief Judge Mary Beck Briscoe was on a 2005 panel overturning an FCC action on USF rules. Attorneys we spoke to said predicting outcomes based on past opinions is risky business. Some willing to venture a prediction said the panel’s history could bode favorably for the challengers, while others cautioned there weren’t enough cases to spot a reliable pattern. The 2011 order, which rewrote the rules of the $4.5 billion-a-year USF and set intercarrier compensation on a path toward bill-and-keep, will be the subject of several hours of oral argument that has had lawyers on all sides busily preparing (CD Nov 8 p10).
Long overdue, Phase II of the Connect America Fund has several open questions about its implementation, attorneys told a Federal Communications Bar Association audience Thursday evening. Originally scheduled to be in place by the end of 2012, the second phase will provide five years of USF support to price cap carriers in return for a statewide commitment to build out networks that can provide voice and broadband service. But many questions are still up in the air, panelists said, from how the cost model will work to what approach the competitive bidding process will take.
"There can be no question” about the importance of the Universal Service Fund and promoting broadband deployment in rural America, but doing so won’t be easy, said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday. FCC commissioners got a brief status update on its moves to reform the USF during the meeting. The presentation went over in some detail recent history of USF reform, including progress on Phase II of the Connect America Fund. Other commission members indicated they had concerns that parts of the program limit full use of the program by carriers. Staff last gave an update at the FCC’s June meeting.
The National Exchange Carrier Association submitted the “latest view” of USF data for the “2011-x and 2012-x” periods, as requested by FCC staff in connection with analyses related to recently adopted USF reforms, NECA said in a filing Wednesday (http://bit.ly/HMTdEO). The data include all changes reported during the past three months, such as corrections for errors and omissions, and “average schedule company” to “cost company” conversions.