Rural Call Completion Record-Keeping Rules Would Be Eased Slightly
An FCC order on circulation would ease some of the record collection, retention and reporting rules approved in a 2013 rural call completion order (CD Oct 29 p2), said commission and industry officials in interviews Wednesday. The draft order likely will be approved, said an agency official. It would grant The Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance (ITTA) and USTelecom’s petition to reconsider the requirements for some intraLATA calls but reject Comptel’s petition to reconsider another aspect of the order, which tightens the definition of small carriers exempted from the requirements, said the officials.
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Although the commission said in last year’s order that it pared back some reporting requirements from what was originally contemplated, the rules have still been criticized by some as too burdensome. NTCA and rural associations that pushed for the regulations are criticizing implementation of the rules as too slow. In addition to the USTelecom, ITTA and Comptel petitions, Sprint (http://bit.ly/1psj03z), Carolina West Wireless (http://bit.ly/1vh2hEW) and Transcom Enhanced Services (http://bit.ly/1tZFpeL) also filed petitions for reconsideration in docket 13-39. In addition, three requests for waivers are still pending. Attorneys and spokespeople for the Comptel, the FCC, ITTA and USTelecom had no comment.
NTCA and rural associations raised concerns in a letter last month (http://bit.ly/1psfiXH) that “a full ten months” after the rules were approved, they weren’t in effect and the FCC hadn’t submitted necessary paperwork to the Office of Management and Budget to implement them. Without the recordkeeping and reporting, “neither the Commission nor the public has any better visibility into the precise sources of such problems and a clear sense of how to address them,” NTCA said. “It is far past time for the Commission to put into place the tools necessary” to deal with the problem,” said the Aug. 18 letter to the FCC from NTCA, the National Exchange Carrier Association and WTA. “It has taken far too long to put into place the record-keeping and reporting rules that were adopted nearly a year ago -- and many rural consumers continue to pay the price in terms of call failures,” said Michael Romano, NTCA senior vice president-policy, in a statement to us. It added that he’s “hopeful the FCC is now taking steps to move those rules forward.” The Wireline Bureau is prepared to promptly submit the paperwork to the OMB if the pending order is approved, said an agency spokesman.
The Jan. 26 USTelecom and ITTA petition (http://bit.ly/1uosTHg) dealt with what it called a “very narrow category” of intraLATA calls that are originated and terminated by the same carrier, or handed off by the originating LEC directly to the terminating LEC. The calls don’t involve intermediate providers, which the commission identified as key contributors to rural call completion problems, and gathering the data would not help solve the completion problem, the petition said.
None of the largest LECs has the capability to capture and report the intraLATA data because those LECs never had a reason to design their networks to keep track of unbilled calls that aren’t completed, the petition said. Implementing “such capability into legacy networks at this time would be time consuming and prohibitively expensive, requiring extensive and expensive system modifications,” the groups said. The rural groups had urged the agency in their reply (http://bit.ly/1qusyez) to be careful in considering the USTelecom and ITTA petition. The rural groups that included WTA suggested the commission wait “until it has implemented [the] rules and gathered, reviewed, and analyzed at least one year’s worth of call completion data” before considering revisions in the rules.
Comptel’s Jan. 16 petition (http://bit.ly/1rizOhk) sought reconsideration of the commission’s decision to define smaller carriers as those with 100,000 or fewer long-distance lines, instead of defining it as those with 100,000 or fewer retail long-distance subscribers set forth in the NPRM. The change increases by 150 percent the number of carriers subject to rules imposing “new information collection requirements” that will be “expensive and burdensome for providers, most especially small providers, to implement,” Comptel said. The change was done without notice or an opportunity to comment, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the petition said. The rural associations did not address Comptel’s petition in their reply.
As the rules await OMB review, major telcos said last week at an FCBA event they are planning to at least partially comply (CD Sept 22 p13).