Panelists Disagree on Role of U.S., States in USF Overhaul
OMAHA -- The FCC should take an active role in creating and enforcing broadband guidelines in its Universal Service Fund reform, T-Mobile Corporate Counsel Teri Ohta said at an FCC workshop Wednesday. “We do feel that the federal government ultimately has the responsibility to make sure those funds are distributed properly.” T-Mobile is worried that giving states authority over broadband regulations will lead to a confusing patchwork of regulations that will make it difficult to deploy broadband, Ohta said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
But Cox Communications Vice President Doug Garrett urged “a narrow” focus by the commission because the technology is changing rapidly. “It’s time for a relook and, potentially, a narrowing of some of the existing obligations so that the public isn’t saddled with an un-ending amount of cost.” Satellite providers have said in their comments that their technology is expanding rapidly, for instance, and Garrett said that eligible telecommunications carrier requirements in states are already forming a barrier to entry. “We should all remain flexible, especially about what is an ETC obligation for broadband, given that broadband is rapidly changing,” he said.
Farmers Mutual Cooperative Telephone General Manager Tom Conry asked the commission not to abandon carrier-of-last-resort regulations. “COLR should be a cornerstone,” he said. “COLR is and should remain under the jurisdiction of the states. It will be very important so that we can bring broadband to consumers."
Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, who helped organize Wednesday’s roundtable and who were instrumental in getting the FCC to hold a workshop in Omaha, reminded those in the crowded room that they were in a hurry to move on USF overhaul. “We're at a critical crossroads and we must -- we must -- reform universal service,” Clyburn said. Copps urged the audience, many of them telecom lobbyists and executives, to be willing to compromise. “We're past the time to listen to long lists of ‘Dear Santa’ letters,” Copps said. “Nobody’s going to get everything that they want. That includes me."
Nebraska regulator Anne Boyle, too, hymned the virtues of compromise. “I pray that everybody will say, ‘I may not like all of it, but we like most of it.’ And don’t go running to Congress to say, ‘We want you to intervene.’ Our country deserves to have this done,” Boyle said. The member of the Nebraska Public Service Commission and her staff acknowledged throughout Wednesday’s panels that compromise is easily praised, not easily done. About 1.1 million of Nebraska’s 1.8 million people live in Omaha or its suburbs, Boyle said. The rest are scattered around some 16,000 square miles. “You can travel a long time on a country road out there and never see another human being,” she said.
Gene Hand, director of the PSC’s telecom department, told us that his state’s farmers are victims of the economies of scale. It’s hard to run a small farmstead and make a living, he said. That means farmers are buying bigger tracks of land and more people are moving out of rural areas. But farmers still need broadband desperately, for everything from marketing their corn online to activating irrigators and other high-tech equipment. He said after Wednesday’s discussion that he was skeptical that oft-praised “competition” would plug the state’s broadband gap. “The markets are so damned small,” he said. The FCC might rethink its guidelines on setting up multiple carriers in an area to “make it easier” to get broadband out, Hand said.
Panelists struggled to find common ground. Windstream Regulatory Counsel Edward Krachmer echoed Cox’s Garrett’s call for a targeted approach. Then he and Garrett disagreed when Krachmer said the commission ought to focus on wire centers rather than census blocks or tracts. Krachmer said he was gratified after a morning’s panel that “uncomfortable questions” are being asked: That’s a sign of progress, he said.