VRS Providers Ask FCC To Stabilize Rates
The six U.S. video relay service providers jointly asked the FCC to halt a proposed cut in VRS rates. The six said the FCC should take steps “to preserve competition and ensure the existence of the three newest and smallest…
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VRS providers until the Commission establishes sustainable rate rules in its ongoing ratemaking proceeding.” ASL Services, CAAG, Convo, CSDVRS, Purple and Sorenson signed the filing, posted Friday in docket 03-123. VRS providers face huge financial pressures, they said. “As explained in the Joint Proposal and follow-up responses to the staff’s questions, providers have endured dramatic rate cuts in 2010 followed by four successive cuts in the last two years. Immediate rate stability is crucial in order to prevent further erosion of functional equivalence, to preserve providers’ ability to innovate, and to preserve reasonable working conditions and compensation for VRS interpreters.” The VRS providers proposed changes in the program aimed at stabilizing rates in March. The steps they proposed then were: requiring providers “to meet a faster service-level requirement so that 80 percent of calls must be answered within 45 seconds”; maintaining compensation rates at the levels in effect during the first half of 2015; doing a trial during which providers could offer “skills-based routing in order to collect data about the cost and feasibility of offering that service”; and encouraging providers to offer deaf interpreters. They expressed a willingness to “work with the Commission’s Disability Advisory Committee to resolve any interoperability issues remaining after the providers’ recent joint efforts to ensure complete interoperability.” Rate stability is a prerequisite to other reforms proposed in the March filing, the VRS providers said last week, “including the more stringent speed-of-answer requirement, the trial of skills-based routing, and increased use of deaf interpreters.”