Comptel Criticizes Paper Lamenting Outdated Regulatory Framework
Comptel criticized a paper commissioned by the Internet Innovation Alliance that ILECs have been touting as evidence that the IP transition is well underway, with only 5 percent of American households relying solely on wireline services. Many of the paper’s claims (CD Oct 10 p8) weren’t supported by the underlying data, which was neither accurately portrayed nor analyzed, Comptel said in a statement Monday. The paper’s author, Georgetown Visiting Senior Policy Scholar Anna-Maria Kovacs, couldn’t be reached for comment. An IIA representative defended the paper’s findings.
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.
Kovacs argued unnecessary regulation forces ILECs to make significant investments in legacy facilities. That claim is based on a “daisy-chain citation through a 2011 paper to a 2008 marketing report” that reaches “fundamentally the opposite conclusion of what the IIA paper asserts,” Comptel said. “It is impossible to understand how the IIA paper can assert that ILECs are continuing to make significant investments in obsolete facilities when the source documents recognize that the ILECs are, in fact, upgrading their networks with new technology."
The claim that ILECs are “forced to waste” capital and operating funds on obsolete networks by “monopoly era” regulation is completely unsupported by any analysis, Comptel said. “Many rural ILECs have deployed IP technology in their networks without any of the drama of AT&T’s highly publicized approach. If there were actually significant regulatory barriers (and the IIA paper fails to identify any specific concerns), how is it that the smallest and most regulated local telephone companies -- those that serve rural markets -- have been able to move forward?"
Broad claims that the 1996 Telecom Act’s unbundling provisions have failed are “entirely limited to the residential consumer market,” and discount the importance of the act’s interconnection provisions that enabled cable entry into that market, Comptel said. In ignoring the business market, the paper ignored the area where the act enables significant competition, the association of CLECs said. Contrary to what the paper claims, the IP transition is not largely over, Comptel said: In the business community especially, voice communications over managed IP networks is what provides the high level of quality businesses depend on.
IIA defended the paper. The data Kovacs used, which came from the FCC and Centers for Disease Control, shows that 95 percent of the U.S. is now using IP-enabled voice services, a spokeswoman said. With just 5 percent of U.S. households relying solely on the traditional wired home phone, the transition to IP-enabled services is “inevitable,” IIA said. “It is critical that the FCC adopt policies that reflect the current state of the marketplace to help provide all Americans with the opportunity to access these next-generation services.”
"Dr. Kovacs clearly explains that, over the six-year-period highlighted in the study, ILECs spent billions more dollars on maintaining old TDM, copper-based networks than on America’s next-generation, IP-enabled communications networks of the future,” IIA said. “It’s time to move forward with the IP Transition and geographically-defined trials that will provide an open and transparent, real-life way for us to address the very issues raised by Comptel.”