AT&T Dismisses BT's Comparisons of UK, US Business Data Prices
AT&T challenged BT arguments in the FCC special access rulemaking in docket 05-25. In a filing Thursday, AT&T said it was responding “to what apparently is becoming a seasonal activity -- BT complaining that it is unfairly impaired in its…
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ability to compete for enterprise customers, because it is paying more for special access services in the United States than what it charges for similar services in the United Kingdom.” AT&T said it had “previously submitted facts to debunk BT’s baseless claims, and outlined in detail the fatal flaws in the underlying assumptions of BT’s claimed analysis of like-for-like services. BT’s latest filing -- which continues its past practice of disregarding all prior critiques of its methodological flaws and simply repeats its hollow (and refuted) allegations -- is similarly specious. For example, there is no information in BT’s submission that would allow a determination as to whether the circuits being compared by BT are actually like-for-like circuits.” AT&T cited other examples of what it said were BT's dubious data comparisons. BT's Nov. 23 filing summarizing a meeting with FCC officials said it discussed “UK regulation of bottleneck services including broadband and business access services” that “had resulted in the lowest prices for superfast and basic broadband services amongst the countries compared including the US, UK, France and Germany.” It said the price finding was made by British regulator Ofcom. The London-based company said the regulation hadn't caused it “to disinvest in broadband or the communications market”; instead, BT had announced plans to upgrade homes and small businesses to speeds of up to 500 Mbps. BT suggested AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had acknowledged that regulation addressing bottlenecks increases business investment by citing the importance of Mexican government reforms to AT&T plans to invest $3 billion in Mexican mobile networks. “AT&T cannot claim regulation enhances investment wherever it seeks to enter markets and compete, but claim the opposite is true in markets where it seeks to defend its monopoly power,” BT said. “This is not a credible position.”