Comments Pour In As USF Deadline Passes
Comments continued to pour in Tuesday as the deadline for filings on industry-proposed universal service and intercarrier compensation regime changes expired. Incumbent telcos were mostly fighting a holding action, while a handful of rural carriers recommitted to fighting against the broader industry consensus. The six companies behind the so-called America’s Broadband Connectivity plan (CD Aug 1 p1) said in a statement that they had come up with a “detailed and workable proposal for fixing the outdated and unsustainable universal service and intercarrier compensation programs.” The companies -- AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, CenturyLink, Windstream and FairPoint -- added: “Adoption of the ABC Plan will lead to greater broadband deployment in rural America. The plan enjoys broad support on issues that have paralyzed the industry for years."
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The Rural Telecommunications Group rejected the incumbents’ plan and the recommendations of the Joint Board, saying it doesn’t do enough for wireless carriers. “In order to be effective and benefit consumers, universal service reform must support the mobile services that consumers are overwhelmingly choosing over other services,” the rural group said in a news release.
Rural wireless carrier Cellular South told FCC staff in meetings last week that if it adopts the incumbents’ plan, the agency faces “the likelihood” that reforms “will be derailed in court” because the commission lacks the authority to subsidize broadband from the Universal Service Fund. “If the Commission moves forward with its current proposal to reform universal service, the overriding issue on appeal will concern the Commission’s subject matter jurisdiction, or its statutorily delegated power to administer the universal service program,” Cellular South said (http://xrl.us/bmcnvi).
Rural wireline associations, which initially filed their own plan but eventually signed comments complimentary to the ABC plan, said the carefully won consensus doesn’t leave a lot of room for FCC tweaking. “If people start pulling at this, it all comes apart,” NTCA Vice President Mike Romano told us Tuesday. “If anybody makes modifications ... it has a real possibility of upending the whole thing."
The FCC shouldn’t be “intimidated by comments that imply that any changes to the plan will result in a lack of industry support for all other elements of the plan,” said the Michigan Public Service Commission. The cross-section of industry support for a single proposed revamp plan is “unprecedented,” the Michigan commission said. But the industry alone shouldn’t set the policy on USF, it said (http://xrl.us/bmcn4m).
Free Press had its own meeting with the FCC last week, saying it had concerns about the industry-backed proposals. “We emphasized the lack of meaningful reform contained in the joint industry framework, and discussed our concerns with the unjustified proposal to increase the Federal Subscriber Line Charge,” Free Press said in an ex parte notice (http://xrl.us/bmcntz). “We asked that the Commission settle the Federal-state separations freeze issue and conduct cost-recovery studies before considering allowing incumbent carriers to reach further into consumers’ pockets or before establishing any new access recovery fund. Finally, we stressed our belief that the best way to meet America’s broadband goals is to increase broadband adoption, and that focusing on fiscal reforms to the High Cost Fund in order to reduce the size of the program and return money to ratepayers is a prudent way to help boost adoption."
Chairman Charles Benton of the Benton Foundation expects public interest groups to press for self-provision and for a percentage of the high-cost fund to be set aside for ongoing broadband programs ala NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, he said Tuesday. “It’s crumbs off the table,” he said. “But that’s what we usually get. Otherwise, this all becomes a discussion among the incumbents and they're talking about dividing up the pie.”