National Telecom Co-op Assn. (NTCA) cautioned FCC against making ...
National Telecom Co-op Assn. (NTCA) cautioned FCC against making “sweeping changes” in regulation of ILEC broadband services without considering their impact on rural areas. Commenting Fri. on FCC’s review of “dominant” ILEC regulation, NTCA said. “The Commission must be…
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careful not to sacrifice rural broadband deployment as it pursues broadband competition. The rural broadband market is nascent” and FCC shouldn’t “assume that the analysis it applies to urban markets has any relevance to rural markets.” FCC is considering ILEC requests for “nondominant” regulation of some of their broadband services (CD Dec 13 p1). Such treatment would lessen tariff filing and pricing support requirements for certain services and markets where ILECs say they're not dominant provider anymore and don’t have market power. Also filing comments Fri. on issue, AT&T said ILEC requests for lessened regulation were unwarranted: “The ILECs unquestionably have market power over the bottleneck inputs necessary to provide broadband services to large and small businesses” as well as residential customers. FCC “dominant carrier” regulations should continue and “are necessary to ensure effective enforcement of wholesale access requirements and detection of anticompetitive price squeezes and other unjust, unreasonable and discriminatory practices,” AT&T said. CompTel urged FCC to reject proposal to reclassify ILEC provision of retail broadband services as nondominant, saying proposal was “empirically unsupported and unjustified.” ILECs have “repeatedly demonstrated anticompetitive behavior, including the extraction of monopoly rents from end-user customers and exclusionary tying arrangements,” CompTel told Commission: “It is not possible for an ILEC to provide nondominant services over bottleneck local exchange facilities and networks.”