Alaska Commission Urged to Slam Brakes on State USF Sunset

The RCA plan would harm rural and remote Alaska customers who “still depend on the voice network for basic telecommunications services, essential government services and public safety,” said ACS in docket R-21-001. Some remote customers would pay more than they receive, cross-subsidizing urban customers and competitive carriers, it said. “It would actually be better for the RCA to sunset the Fund, than to adopt regulations that have such extreme irrational and harmful effects on one group of rural communities.”

The RCA should keep existing AUSF rules for at least three years, ACS said. "The proposed redistribution of support creates perverse and anomalous results that are contrary to preserving universal service, violate [Alaska Statutes 42.05.840] and harm public interest goals.” Rather than shift support to more remote areas, the RCA proposal would treat similar rural ILECs "differently without any showing of differences of need, or other reasonable basis or legitimate public purpose,” it said. It would discriminate against rural ILECs that left the intrastate access pool and developed their own tariffs for non-traffic sensitive access cost recovery, said ACS: It would unfairly treat the non-pooled ILECs differently from competitors in their study areas, removing much essential network support (ENS) from the ILEC and awarding extra support to the competitor.

"Reject the proposed regulations and simply extend the sunset by four years ... to preserve enough time for meaningful AUSF reform," said Matanuska Telecom Association in joint comments with ACS and Ketchikan Public Utilities. Proposed changes would "create an equal protection problem with ENS allocation by treating unpooled remote ILECs differently from pooled remote ILECs for no apparently legitimate government purpose," they said.

The RCA still has AUSF authority despite a 2019 deregulation law known as SB-83, Alaska's AG office stressed. Commissioners shouldn't adopt a "drop dead date" for the AUSF, which remains important, it said. "The notion of putting the onus on telecommunications industry to develop and present an AUSF solution to the Commission before June 30, 2025, is an attractive, but flawed, possibility.” A typically two-year rulemaking would need to be opened by June 30, 2023, but the telecom industry resolving differences in the next seven months seems “unlikely at best,” said the AG office: Better to require a full AUSF review by June 30, 2025, with a possible sunset two years later. Customers in high-cost, hard-to-serve areas will be hurt most by a sunset, it said.

Remove the proposed sunset or at least extend it by two years to allow more time for a legislative fix, which probably will require more than one annual session, said the Alaska Remote Carrier Coalition (ARCC). If the legislature affirms AUSF’s importance and the commission’s oversight role, adding a two-year review period to the staff proposal would give the RCA enough time to open a docket in 2025, commented ARCC: AUSF is vital for remote members that serve villages not connected by roads.

Like the telegraph, AUSF-supported copper networks are "becoming antiquated and in need of retirement,” said CTIA, urging RCA to continue with sunset plans. If the commission "feels it must extend its current deadline to end the AUSF in 2023, it should use this opportunity to plan for a gradual -- and final -- phasedown of AUSF support" by 2025, the wireless association said. "This draw-down period would provide LECs notice and give them time to modernize their operations,” while giving “consumers much-needed certainty of relief from disproportionate subsidy obligations.”