AT&T Pushes Special Access Aggregated-Data Disclosure; Sprint, XO Hit ILEC Dominance
AT&T pressed the FCC to allow public filings with aggregated industry data in the agency’s broad review of its special access rules for the business broadband market. The incumbent telco said a commission prohibition on public disclosure of such aggregated data -- which it said shows widespread competition -- is limiting debate unnecessarily. “So c’mon FCC, take your thumb off the scale so that we can have a fair and transparent fact-based discussion here,” said Caroline Van Wie, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory, in a blog post Tuesday. The FCC had no comment. Many parties filed detailed reply comments Friday on the commission’s special access review in docket 05-25 (see 1602220059).
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ILECs said the business market already was highly competitive in 2013 -- the year for which the FCC collected industry data -- and has grown only more so. “The record shows all kinds of providers -- and especially cable companies -- competing to provide business broadband services to meet that demand,” Verizon said in its reply. “If the Commission analyzes the business broadband marketplace as it must -- using a forward-looking analysis that begins with current data and accounts for these dynamic trends -- it will find no basis to single out incumbent LECs for special regulation.” Even using the “outdated and incomplete record here, the evidence of competition where there is concentrated demand includes steadily declining retail prices ... mass migration from legacy technologies" to new and better technologies, “disruptive facilities-based entry by cable companies” and other signs of market progress benefiting customers, Verizon said.
But ILEC critics said the data show incumbents dominated the special access market. Sprint criticized “flawed” incumbent analysis and complaints that the data are incomplete. Incumbent telcos “ignore that the data set remains remarkably comprehensive, and that it likely understates the extent of incumbent dominance because of the incumbents’ own omissions in response to the Commission’s data request,” Sprint said in its reply. “The massive record compiled over the course of this extensive proceeding demonstrates the urgency with which the Commission must act as it begins the process of repairing the broken special access marketplace.”
“It is evident that competition does not exist in most Dedicated Services markets, including markets where ILECs had qualified for pricing flexibility,” XO Communications said in its reply, which came before it announced Monday it is selling its fiber-optic business to Verizon. “XO called for reregulation where competition does not exist, including the adoption of interim pricing measures,” it added.
AT&T in its blog post said the industry data constitutes “a whopping 120 million records making up more than 15 Gigabytes of data.” The FCC restricted access to the sensitive market data to outside parties hired by stakeholders subject to confidentiality protections. AT&T said outside market analysts “aggregated the granular, company-specific data to provide high level, yet accurate, snapshots on the state of competitive deployment both nationally and in specific markets.” But that aggregated information was redacted from public filings due to an FCC order prohibiting disclosure. “The public is limited to generic descriptions that lack the specificity of hard data -- phrases like ‘the majority of.’ But does ‘the majority’ mean 51% or 75%? The Commission has never before stifled speech in this manner,” AT&T said.
AT&T said it has been almost a month since it and CenturyLink filed requests to allow aggregated data to be made public, but the commission has given no indication if it intends to act on the requests anytime soon. “The analyses at issue here clearly show that competition is present in nearly all census blocks where there is demand for special access services, and that virtually all business establishments are located within those census blocks,” AT&T said.
The Phoenix Center said the data will not “provide the proverbial ‘silver bullet’ proponents of strict Special Access price regulation” are seeking. To the contrary, the data “will likely show that regulation is unnecessary in many geographic areas and already adequate, if not too strict in others,” said George Ford, the group’s chief economist, in a study, "The Road to Nowhere," released Tuesday.