FCC APPROVES SBC SEC. 271 APPLICATION FOR MICH.
The FCC Wed. approved SBC’s request to offer long distance service in Mich. This was the company’s 3rd attempt to gain Sec. 271 approval for the state. Ameritech, before it merged with SBC, withdrew an application for Mich. in 1997 and SBC pulled out in April of this year after it appeared that the FCC was going to turn down the application because of questions about the adequacy of billing functions SBC offered to competitors.
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The FCC said competing carriers provided service to 21.7% of all lines in Mich. as of Dec. and there were 1.45 million competitive carrier lines operating there, 932,667 of them served via the UNE platform. The Telecom Act’s Sec. 271 requires the Bells to make their local markets open to competitors before they can gain long distance authority. The Dept. of Justice told the FCC in July that it still had concerns about SBC’s provision of wholesale billing, although it said the company had made progress in improving its billing performance.
Comrs. Copps and Adelstein issued separate statements, saying they were satisfied with SBC’s efforts to meet the requirements of Sec. 271 and solve some of the problems raised earlier by competitors. “I believe that moving ahead now is the right thing to do” as long as there is “rigorous and sustained follow-through,” Copps said. “Serious questions” had been raised about wholesale billing, he said, but “despite some past difficulties in this area, the record does not demonstrate that there are ongoing violations that call into question the current openness of the local market in Michigan.”
Adelstein said 2 areas “warrant special attention on a going-forward basis -- the provision of wholesale bills to competitive LEC customers and the processes for line splitting.” He said much of the record in the proceeding focused on wholesale billing and the order found SBC “satisfied the standard required under our precedent for wholesale billing, based in part on a recognition that the complexity of telephone company billing systems and the high volume of transactions make some level of carrier-to-carrier disputes inevitable.” He said the order also noted concerns about line-splitting processes in Mich. and he was pleased SBC was “engaged in collaborative testing of new line- splitting procedures that would address many of the concerns raised.”
SBC Mich. Pres. Gail Torreano said as a result of the FCC’s approval the company would begin offering bundled service packages that included long distance. Mich. is the 9th of SBC’s states to receive Sec. 271 approval and an application for the remaining 4 -- Ill., Ind., Ohio, and Wis. -- is pending at the FCC, which must act on it by an Oct. 15 deadline.
An AT&T spokeswoman said the company was disappointed because: “The FCC overlooked the obvious shortcomings of this application… Marketplace experience and the record before the FCC confirmed that SBC continues to impede competition in local markets in Michigan… The fact that competitors have achieved some success in local markets in Michigan does not justify granting SBC unfettered access to the long distance market.”