Cable Industry: Holiday Weekend Orders Were Fitting Coda to Martin’s Tenure
Cable industry officials were upset but not surprised at the last-minute release by outgoing FCC Chairman Kevin Martin of fines against cable operators, long sought data and a letter of inquiry that questioned whether cable operators’ phone services should be subject to stricter regulations. The documents, which trickled out of the agency over the long holiday weekend, included 31 notices of apparent liability or notices of forfeiture against cable operators, a letter to Comcast seeking information about how it handles its own VoIP calls compared to third-party VoIP traffic, the 2007 Video Competition Report and a cable pricing survey from the Media Bureau.
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“It certainly seems these items could have been issued over the past several weeks during regular business hours with the knowledge of the regular commission,” an NCTA spokesman said. Nine cable operators were fined for failing to provide data the FCC sought regarding the movement of programming from analog to digital service tiers. Those companies will decide individually how to proceed with the fines and NALs, the NCTA spokesman said. “But the way they were issued, over a holiday weekend and on Martin Luther King Day, which is a federal government holiday, really display petty and childish behavior and these items should be treated with the complete lack of seriousness with which they were pursued.” The FCC declined to comment.
Particularly alarming was a letter from Wireline Bureau Chief Dana Shaffer and FCC General Counsel Matthew Barry to Comcast, said Steve Effros, a cable industry consultant. The letter asked why Comcast didn’t include information about how its VoIP service is handled compared to third-party services such as Vonage or Skype in its comprehensive filings to comply with the agency’s network management ruling. The letter suggests that Comcast’s VoIP service may be considered a Title II telecommunications service rather than a Title I information service under the Communications Act.
“We do have the Administrative Procedures Act and there are other commissioners,” Effros said. “If you're going to ask the question whether VoIP should be considered a Title II service, you don’t do it in a letter of inquiry to one company.” The question is so broad, he said, it could only be decided by the full commission.
The FCC also released the latest version of its annual report to Congress on CMRS competition. The report found that at the end of 2007, 99.6 percent of the U.S. population had access to service from one or more providers. “U.S. consumers continue to reap significant benefits -- including low prices, new technologies, improved service quality, and choice among providers -- from competition in the CMRS marketplace, both terrestrial and satellite CMRS,” the report said. The FCC said there were 263 million mobile telephone subscribers in the United States at the end of 2007, up from 241.8 million the previous year.
The report in the past has been a political hot potato. Commissioners Robert McDowell and Michael Copps were critical of various conclusions in the report when the last version was released last February. This time it was released without accompanying comments by any of the commissioners.