Special Access Ripe for Resolution, Sprint Executive Says
With a deadline next week on the latest inquiry on special access prices, a Sprint Nextel executive said Tuesday the FCC appears ready to address the company’s long standing complaints. Sprint is also asking the FCC to act quickly to reallocate spectrum bands totaling 100 MHz, which the company believes could be addressed well ahead of eventual decisions about broadcast spectrum or spectrum in federal government hands.
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Special access “is getting some traction” at the FCC, said Charles McKee, Sprint vice president, federal & state regulatory affairs: “It’s not currently being talked about on the eighth floor as an action item, but in part that’s because the commission issued a [public notice] on it and sent it back down to the bureau for further work. The bureau has been working hard on coming up with an appropriate approach.”
McKee said he doesn’t expect the FCC to raise additional questions about special access prices in the National Broadband Plan. “Since they are already addressing the more granular issues within the PN, I'm not sure they are going to try to duplicate that,” he said. He called the issue a “hard nut to crack” since the market is worth at least $16 billion annually. “You don’t come after something that big in a light way,” he said. “What the commission is doing is taking a very measured approach towards how they're going to break down this product market and how they're going to address it.”
McKee said Sprint also is offering the FCC additional suggestions on how to address the Universal Service Fund, which were spelled out last week in comments on an NCTA proposal on the fund (CD Jan 11 p8). “The first step is to acknowledge that these local loops that USF is being used to support provide more than just narrowband voice service. It’s irrational at this point to just assume that 100 percent of the cost of this loop needs to be supported by voice services when that same loop is being used by all kinds of other services,” McKee said. “Step two is to suggest that the commission needs to change its thinking from encouraging ILECs to build facilities to providing consumers the funds to support services they want.”
Sprint is also urging the FCC to address several blocks of spectrum ripe for allocation as part of the National Broadband Plan, said Larry Krevor, Sprint vice president for spectrum. “Spectrum has always been looked at kind of piecemeal,” Krevor said. “Somebody needed spectrum or there was a new technology. You found a piece of spectrum, develop service rules and you go out and assign it one way or another. This broadband initiative has given the commission an opportunity to take a more fulsome view of spectrum. We've tried to give the commission some short- to mid-term targets of spectrum it could bring to broadband which could really make a difference.”
Trey Hanbury, director, government affairs, spectrum proceedings at Sprint, said the company conducted its own spectrum inventory of sorts. Sprint is asking the FCC to make a decision about the future of the D, H and J blocks, the AWS 3 band, spectrum available from mobile satellite services (MSS) reallocation and Wireless Communications Service spectrum, Hanbury said. “Not one of those proceedings had been pending for less than four years,” he said. “They are ripe and they are ready.”
Krevor said the FCC appears ready to resolve the future of some the bands. “We've been talking to staff and we think there’s a lot of receptiveness,” Krevor said. “Presumably, at a minimum, the [broadband] plan would say over the next six months or eight months or a year we will auction H block. We will do J block. We will make a decision on what to do with AWS.”