Wheeler Circulates Rulemakings on IP Transition
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated two draft NPRMs Friday, before the Nov. 21 commissioner meeting, that would deal with longstanding issues on the IP transition. The drafts ask among other things if the agency should require that replacements to copper meet the needs of customers before the traditional lines can be retired, said senior commission officials in a briefing with news media on the condition they not be identified. They said the items would raise other questions, including how to prevent large-scale 911 outages, and whether incumbents have to offer competitive carriers an alternative at reasonable rates, terms and conditions when retiring last-mile services that competitors need to reach business customers.
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The items “take up the task of encouraging technology transitions while protecting …core values,” Wheeler said in a blog post.
One proposal being circulated would deal with ensuring consumer protection, competition and public safety during the IP transition, said a senior official. Noting that unlike phone service on traditional copper lines, service on fiber and other networks rely on backup batteries during power outages, the official said one of the items would ask what steps the commission should take to oversee backup systems and if the commission should propose specific requirements on them.
The same item also asks about allegations by Public Knowledge and others (see 1407020049) that customers aren’t fully notified about their options when copper is being retired and that in some cases customers are being pushed to give up the copper service carriers say is too expensive to maintain. Verizon, which has been accused of some of those practices, did not comment (see 1403270047).
The tentative conclusion that carriers retiring copper make wholesale alternatives available would come after competitive carriers say retirement of the services would leave them no options, and could force them out of business and ultimately reduce competition. Wheeler raised the issue in a speech in Dallas last month about the need to ensure competition even during the transition (see 1410070028). Taking action on the issue would “ensure that small- and medium-sized businesses do not have the benefits of competition yanked away from them,” Wheeler wrote.
“It is important for the FCC to ensure that ‘last-mile’ facilities, connecting competitors’ extensive fiber networks to individual customer locations, do not become an anti-competitive bottleneck or strategic leverage to force dramatic price increases on consumers,” said Eric Einhorn, Windstream senior vice president-government affairs and strategy, in a statement. The commission “must ensure that incumbents do not exploit their transition to IP technologies as a way to diminish or eliminate the wholesale access to last-mile connections on which competitors rely to serve business customers,” said Comptel CEO Chip Pickering in praising the items.
The other NPRM would say that technology changes can pose public safety challenges, saying placing a 911 call can involve several different companies spread out across the country, according to the senior official. That “means a failure in one place can leave people without 911 service across multiple states, indeed across the nation,” Wheeler said in the post. That’s lead “a spike in so-called 'sunny day' outages, when failure comes from the failure of software or databases and not from natural disasters,” the post said.