Wheeler, FCC Staff Seem Fully Committed to IP Transition, Top AT&T Official Says at CES
LAS VEGAS -- AT&T is very optimistic about the direction the FCC is heading on the IP transition, with a rulemaking teed up for a vote at the commission’s January meeting, said Senior Vice President Bob Quinn. Speakers during a CES panel hosted by USTelecom said the transition to IP from a plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) world is one of the biggest issues facing the agency. “I'm pretty optimistic,” Quinn said. “One of the things they [at the FCC] really get is that this be voluntary. I don’t think they want to mandate people to participate in this trial. … They want telephone companies who are interested in conducting these test beds to come forward and say, ‘Where would [you] like to have these done and what is your timeframe, what is your plan.'"
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.
Quinn told us the shutdown of POTS is roughly equivalent to the shutdown of analog wireless service seven years ago. “We did a lot of education, we did a lot of different programs to encourage people to get onto digital technology and off of the analog network, but at the end of day we still had several hundred thousand customers who were still on analog when we shut the network off,” he said. “At the end of the day, we are going to have shut down the POTS network.”
Some AT&T subscribers will have to be “migrated” by AT&T, Quinn said. “If they're in a U-verse area, we're going to have to say at some point, ‘Hey, we're going to switch your POTS wired phone over to VoIP product.'” AT&T is going to have to “help make that transition for a customer if they haven’t come into the store and said, ‘Hey, I want to try U-verse VoIP.'” While the rules are still developing, “I'm pretty sure they're going to allow us to bring in plans for individual wire centers, to take individual wire centers to all-IP,” Quinn said. “It’s really in line with what we asked for.” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and acting General Counsel Jonathan Sallet and staff have been very focused on “what can we do to start this,” Quinn said. “I think that Chairman Wheeler thinks it’s really important to oversee this."
Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said “hopefully” there are enough votes at the agency now for the kinds of IP transition test beds that have been proposed by AT&T. “This is absolutely necessary for consumers,” he said. “We need to understand markets.” McDowell added, “We're talking about test beds here, folks … not every grandmother in America is going to get the wires pulled out of her house.”
"My hope would be that the commission operates under a quick timeline, that the NPRM comment cycle is fair but disciplined and relatively short,” McDowell told us. “This is 2014 already; 2016 is a presidential election year. There’s not a lot of time before we switch administrations. We don’t want the IP transition regulatory framework to just linger with a lot of uncertainty and loose ends."
IP transition test beds and pilot projects are critical as the industry moves away from POTS, Quinn said. “When we turn POTS off, we don’t think everything is going to break, but until we do it somewhere you just don’t know what you don’t know,” he said. “You don’t [know what] issues that haven’t arisen yet that you're going to have to solve in order to turn off POTS."
AT&T has never “really retired” many services, Quinn said. “We've got all these legacy services that are being offered,” he said. “We have all the old long-distance plans that people used to buy, that people have bought for years. You still have people who are sitting on those plans. We have to shut all those down. We have to migrate those folks onto more simplified IP service plans that we have. Part of that is going to implicate a lot of different policy concerns.” AT&T knows the future won’t be a “regulatory free zone,” Quinn said. “But we don’t know what all the rules are going to be and we need someone to kind of play the role of determining what those rules are, and the FCC seems like the right place to go about doing it."
In areas where Verizon has deployed FiOS, less than a million homes, or about 6 percent, are still on copper lines, said Vice President David Young. “This IP transition is well, well under way,” Young said. “The challenge is … what do we do about those last few percent and how do we migrate them over in an orderly way? I think equally important is how do we move away from the regulatory structure that had been designed for a monopoly service environment now to one when there are all these alternatives available."
Telcos like Verizon are still regulated as though the Telecom Act never passed and the IP transition never started, Young said. The transition is “challenging the assumptions that underlie most of the regulations that apply to the wireline world."
McDowell said the world changed rapidly between when he was sworn in as a commissioner in June 2006 and when he left the agency last year. “The number one social networking site was Myspace,” he said. “Wireless-only households were about 15 percent of total households. Now it’s a majority.” The number of FCC regulations has grown even as industry becomes more competitive, he said. In 1961, when there was one phone company and three TV networks, all communications regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations ran 463 pages, McDowell said. In 2010, there were 3,695 pages of regulations in the code. Today, there are 3,868.
"Given the size of this transformation, we have to come [up] with a better term for it,” said consultant Larry Downes, author of the book Big Bang Disruption. “We've reached a point where the IP protocols are both better and cheaper to deploy, to maintain, to operate, than the old switched telephone network. This was not something that anybody would have imagined when the 1996 Telecom Act was passed. We didn’t have voice-over-Internet telephony at that point.”