CLECs Need Regulatory Certainty, Interconnection Rights Regardless of Technology, They Say
The IP transition is happening irrespective of the FCC’s proposed trials, and smaller competitive providers worry about losing wholesale access to the telecom infrastructure, CLEC representatives said at a Comptel panel Tuesday, webcast from Las Vegas. Without definitive action from the FCC, CLECs have appealed to state regulators to maintain interconnection rights as the dominant technology changes, but it’s important for the FCC to help ensure regulatory certainty, they said.
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"It’s a simple economic reality that the IP transition is something that we need to do,” said Charles McKee, vice president-government affairs at Sprint. McKee said he’s concerned about whether the trials are designed to “simply implement a conversion,” or whether that technology conversion is “held up for other purposes.” Is it going to be used as leverage in a regulatory battle? “Those are the concerns I have: that we're going to have delays” and “miss out on the two big advantages” of IP conversion. Advantages include the “dramatic reduction in cost” with its billions of dollars in cost savings, and the “really cool features and new products” available on an IP platform, he said. The potential need for “years of trials” before getting to the question of what to do about wholesale access just means “delay,” he said.
AT&T has done a great job convincing policymakers of the importance of the IP transition, said Eric Einhorn, senior vice president-government affairs for Windstream. From a CLEC perspective, the regulatory focus needs to be on continued wholesale access, he said: If the agency doesn’t get the rules right, competitive providers won’t be able to service customers. It’s important to make sure the FCC understands “there’s only one right solution: There has to be a vibrant wholesale marketplace,” Einhorn said. “We need to do the work to get them focused on it in the next year or two years, because we don’t have a lot of time to get this done.”
Panel moderator Joe Gillan, an economist who has done work on behalf of CLECs, agreed. “AT&T has brought enormous focus to this issue,” but in such a way that all the energy is focused on residential issues, he said. “This is our political cycle on IP issues, period.”
In the absence of an FCC decision on continuing legal obligations in an IP world, “the states are struggling with this,” said tw telecom Vice President Kristie Ince. State legislatures are looking at legislation to deregulate the VoIP side, while public utility commissions and state legislatures still want jurisdiction over interconnection and wholesale issues that come up, she said. “It is really either a left turn or a right turn that we're going to take,” Ince said: If the FCC issues an order requiring ILECs to sell wholesale interconnection services, they will do so; “in the absence of that, why would they?”
The FCC has been “abdicating responsibility” on deciding what legal obligations apply to IP interconnection, said Kelley Drye attorney Tom Cohen, who represents CLECs and cable operators. “The issue has been before it and it hasn’t dealt with it,” he said. State work has “helped to make the case: It’s time, decide the issue, give us the certainty of that regulatory backstop,” Cohen said. “For the smaller cable operators, it’s important for them in terms of the lack of leverage in dealing with AT&T or someone bigger on the lack of interconnection."
"There will continue to be a very large market for” time-division multiplexing in 2019, regardless of whether AT&T stops offering the service at that time, said McKee. In some ways this is a conversation about “how do we force a conversion” at a time when AT&T “can most effectively dictate how that conversion takes place?” he said. McKee said he’s “suspicious” that “this quote unquote transition is simply being used to ensure that those transitions from AT&T customer A to AT&T customer B continue in the way that is most effective for them.”