Verizon, NTCA Agree Call Completion Order Carries Unnecessary Burdens
Verizon doesn’t understand why long distance companies should have to keep detailed records on calls going to urban destinations, when dropped calls to rural areas are what the FCC is worried about. The National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, whose rural members are the ones most directly affected by dropped calls, agrees with Verizon. The circulating rural call completion order is scheduled for a vote Monday.
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"In August, Verizon carried approximately 105 million long distance calls daily, of which approximately 94 million were to non-rural destinations,” Verizon told an aide to Commissioner Ajit Pai on Tuesday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/17cjAhh). “A requirement to retain non-rural call detail records for up to seven months would therefore force Verizon to retain nearly 20 billion individual call detail records.” That’s a pointless burden when the “only relevant data point” is the overall call answer rate for non-rural calls, Verizon said. Verizon made the same arguments to an aide to acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn in a meeting Thursday (http://bit.ly/1a1dCfu).
NTCA sides with Verizon on this point. “We don’t think that people should be bearing unnecessary burdens,” said Michael Romano, NTCA senior vice president-policy. “We want to be reasonable.” If Verizon submits data on aggregate call completion, and retains data on failures in rural areas, “we don’t think it’s necessary actually for them to maintain individual call detail of nonrural calls,” Romano told us. “The commission probably could relieve them of some of that burden that Verizon’s concerned about. We're not trying to make this impossible for people, we just want to get to the root of the problem.”
"The item is still in flux and still subject to negotiation,” an FCC official told us. With the government closed for more than two weeks, “obviously everyone had a very compressed schedule,” the official said. The priority for FCC staff at the moment is getting as many meetings in as possible before the sunshine period kicks in Thursday, said the official, who expects a lot of negotiation on the item.
Still others worry the commission’s proposed solution of extensive record keeping won’t do much to solve the problem. In a meeting Friday between USTelecom and a Clyburn aide, the association of ILECs expressed concern that the order “may not lead to behavioral changes in the near future that would reduce the percentage of uncompleted calls to rural exchanges,” an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/19wjAbH). USTelecom asked the commission to modify the proposal to “create incentives on the part of inter-exchange carriers to implement and comply with industry best practices for call routing and completion, such as through the use of safe harbors.”