Windstream Knocks AT&T Opposition To 'Hold Harmless' IP Transition Approach
Windstream fired back at AT&T’s opposition to possible FCC IP transition interim rules that Windstream believes are needed to protect competition and prevent business market price hikes. “AT&T’s arguments are unmoored from reality and the law,” Windstream said in an ex parte filing in FCC docket 13-5. Windstream, which is both a CLEC and an ILEC, said that AT&T was ignoring the market downside if CLECs lose affordable wholesale access to ILEC last-mile networks and the FCC’s past reliance on wholesale competition to give ILECs previous regulatory relief. AT&T didn't comment. The FCC announced Friday tentative plans to vote Aug. 6 on two draft orders intended to protect wholesale competition and consumers during the IP technology transition (see 1507160046).
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AT&T had urged the FCC to reject Windstream’s push for a “hold harmless” approach to the IP transition that AT&T said would re-regulate ILEC ethernet rates (see 1507150052). AT&T said that the Windstream proposals would be legally defective and bad policy, given how competitive the business market is, particularly for ethernet services. The FCC would face “two insurmountable legal bars” to such re-regulation, AT&T said: It would have to reverse forbearance relief granted a decade before and satisfy the “stringent standards” of Section 205 of the Communications Act to prescribe rates for such services. “The FCC does not remotely have the record to reach either conclusion,” said AT&T, saying commission action was especially inappropriate while it's still considering related industry data in its special-access review.
Windstream said Monday that AT&T ignored numerous realities, including that businesses, government entities, educational institutions and healthcare providers would lose competitive alternatives, or at least see price hikes, if AT&T were to succeed in raising its wholesale prices for last-mile connections to customers that CLECs can’t otherwise serve. Windstream said that the FCC and AT&T had relied on the existence of special access alternatives using traditional TDM systems in justifying the commission decision to forbear from price regulation of packet-based ILEC special access services. The status quo wouldn't change until AT&T or any other ILEC with such forbearance relief attempts to discontinue TDM-based special access services over DS1 (1.5 Mbps) and DS3 (45 Mbps) circuits, Windstream said.
Windstream said that AT&T was also ignoring that Section 214(c) expressly authorizes the FCC “to impose discontinuance conditions when necessary to protect the public interest, which includes the effect on competition." Windstream said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had said Section 214(c) allows the FCC “to impose conditions in derogation of the provisions of Sections 203-205,” despite what AT&T argued on Section 205’s obstacle to commission action. Any FCC action on special access prices at the time of a discontinuance was necessarily interim, given the agency’s ongoing special access review, Windstream said.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler recently circulated a draft IP transition order that would require ILECs to notify consumers and competitors of copper retirement plans, and to offer competitors replacement wholesale services at rates, terms, and conditions that are “reasonably comparable” to those of legacy services (see 1507100050). The draft would also define copper retirement in a way “to prevent retirement of networks by neglect (sometimes referred to as ‘de facto retirement’)” an FCC fact sheet said.
Verizon Monday said it urged senior FCC staffers not to define copper retirement as including “de facto retirements.” In an ex parte filing, Verizon said that “defining copper retirement to include de facto retirement could result in unmanageable loop-by-loop retirement requirements and complicate a provider’s ability to move customers to fiber when that is the best and most efficient way to resolve troubles they are experiencing with copper facilities.”
NARUC General Counsel James Ramsay informed FCC staffers attending the state regulatory group’s meeting in New York last week of his group’s positions on the IP transition, including its backing of a continued federal-state partnership to protect consumers and competition, according to an ex parte filing posted Monday. NARUC believes the best way to do this is to “acknowledge the obvious -- that IP-based voice and data services, like Broadband Internet Access Service, are in fact ‘telecommunications services’ subject to the 1996 [Telecom] Act’s regulatory framework,” Ramsay said in the filing. If the FCC fails to take that classification step, he said that it should at least make clear that it is not undermining state authority and that states “will continue to have a role with respect to IP-based services -- particularly with respect to service quality and universal service.”