The FCC shouldn’t get bogged down in questions of how to classify text messaging for Universal Service Fund contributions or any other piecemeal approach to universal service contribution reform, USTelecom warned the commission in comments posted to docket 06-122 and released Tuesday. “Universal service contribution issues need to be addressed in a comprehensive proceeding, not through ad hoc proceedings, such as those for which the Commission requests comment here,” USTelecom executives David Cohen and Jonathan Banks wrote in their comments.

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The House Commerce Committee is content to let the FCC take a first run at the Universal Service Fund overhaul, a committee spokeswoman told us Friday. “We are waiting to see what the FCC decides to do before we make a decision on whether legislation is necessary,” the spokeswoman said. Congress’ tacit approval of the FCC’s reform schedule had been expected (CD Feb 8 p1) but Friday’s statement comes amidst a blitz by rural telcos trying to get the Hill to intervene in the USF proceedings (CD May 25 p8). On the Senate side, Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. has said D-block legislation is his “highest priority” (CD Feb 17 p4).

CTIA strongly opposed an FCC proposal that wireless carriers pay Interstate Telecommunications Service Provider (ITSP) fees for the first time. The opposition came in comments responding to a May notice of proposed rulemaking on changes to the commission’s regulatory fees regime. PCIA said a proposed 20 percent fee increase on Private Land Mobile Radio Service (PLMRS) licenses would be unfairly burdensome. USTelecom said the FCC needs to make fundamental changes to its formula for calculating ITSP fees, which go well beyond anything proposed in the NPRM. For FY 2011, Congress has mandated that the FCC collect $335,794,000 through regulatory fees to cover its cost of operations.

Session Initiation Protocol, the primary open standard used by service providers, works with IPv6, said Dan York, director of conversations at Voxeo, a provider of interactive voice services. But service providers need to make sure devices running on the network are IPv6-ready, he said during an USTelecom webinar Thursday. He said he expects IPv4 and IPv6 to co-exist for quite some time before a full transition. A dual-stack protocol implementation in an operating system is a key IPv4-IPv6 transition technology, he noted. Now is a good time to experiment with IPv6, he said, noting June 8 is the World IPv6 Day, the date for the first global trial for the new Internet protocol. Most of the network vendors have been IPv6-ready for a long time, he said. Some providers may continue IPv4 but have IPv6 on their internal networks, he said.

The FCC’s comment period has closed and industry officials are pressing their cases for Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime updates at venues from the Hill to the commission. Talks continue, with the hope of reaching an industry-wide consensus, but each sector has already begun pressing cases in ex parte meetings and Hill visits. Rural telcos have been dropping letters off on the Hill, asking legislators to urge FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski “strongly” to “consider the proposals put forward by the rural associations (OPASTCO, WTA, NTCA and NECA).” OPASTCO Vice President Randy Tyree said he hopes Congress will “weigh in and let the FCC know the importance of rural cooperatives that are out there serving and doing a good job.”

Industry remains divided on how best to fix the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regimes, with a few months left before an FCC-promised deadline. Despite broad agreement that USF and intercarrier comp need fixing, reply comments show deep divisions over such questions as how quickly to transform to an all-IP network, how to treat VoIP service and the role of satellite and wireless technologies. “There is no doubt that the current universal service fund … and intercarrier compensation regimes are not sustainable in light of market and technological changes,” the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance said. “The comments show that there is no industry consensus in favor of the reforms outlined in the Notice or any other plan to promote broadband deployment to unserved areas.” The replies were posted in docket 10-90.

The House would cut the broadband loans program at the Rural Utilities Service under fiscal 2012 budget legislation moving through the Appropriations Committee. The panel’s Agriculture Subcommittee late Tuesday approved an agriculture bill that counts the RUS program among its cuts. House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., slammed the proposed cut. USTelecom and the NTCA supported giving $22 million to the loans program under an amendment submitted by Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo. At our deadline, the subcommittee voted not to adopt the Lummis amendment.

An industry group led by USTelecom discussed the need for a model that would “accurately identify the costs of building and operating broadband networks in high-cost areas throughout the country.” The discussion came in a meeting with Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett and others at the FCC, said an ex parte filing. “Such a model could be used to identify areas that are high-cost to deliver broadband, some of which may be currently unserved, and to determine amounts of support to ensure that broadband services of a specific nature are available in those areas.” The industry representatives also discussed the advantages of a “greenfield network build” approach versus “the National Broadband Plan’s network augmentation build approach, which was used to size the cost of extending currently existing networks to unserved areas,” the filing said. Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream representatives took part in the meeting, along with consultant CostQuest which does economic models for the telecom industry.

For the second month in a row, the FCC won’t take on any high-profile issues at its monthly meeting. The agenda for the June 9 open meeting lists four items, none likely to excite much attention (CD May 23 p6). The May meeting’s agenda was similarly light (CD May 13 p 9).