NARUC'S FINAL PANELS ADDRESS BUILDING ACCESS AND MORE

CLEC and landlord interests locked horns at NARUC panel on building access in competitive telecom environment. Burt Braverman, Washington attorney representing CLEC interests, said that 3 years after FCC took action to break down building access barriers faced by CLECs, “they continue to face pervasive and persistent problems” in gaining access to multitenant office and apartment buildings, with main stumbling blocks being discriminatory preferences and unreasonable fees. He said tenants “are largely unable to influence the process” because of long-term leases and fact that benefits of moving to competitively-served premises rarely justify costs of move. He said some states had moved far in guaranteeing competitive building access, such as Cal., Conn. and Tex., and several others were moving in that direction. He said state courts in Mass. struck down regulators’ building access rules while Tex. trial court upheld rules in case that’s under appeal.

But Wash. attorney Gerry Lederer, representing building owner and manager interests, said that ever since terror attacks of 9/11, landlords had been trying to woo multiple telecom providers to serve their buildings “because that’s what our tenants tell us they want.” Problem for landlords, he said, is that there are few competitive carriers to ask. He said income from telecom access represented only 0.5% of revenue stream landlords derived from their buildings, and no landlord would jeopardize rental dollars in order to pick up telecom pennies by blocking competitive carriers from buildings when tenants wanted them. Lederer also said landlords needed CLECs in their buildings to give them leverage when dealing for access with incumbent telcos. Braverman retorted that landlords had trouble finding CLECs to come in because they kept insisting on charging for access at prices far above cost, when CLECs were pinching every penny just to survive. Lederer suggested that if states sought to intervene with building access regulations, they needed to “invite the real estate industry in at the earliest stages of discussion.”

Speakers at NARUC panel on voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony urged states to refrain from regulating that technology. But if states were to go ahead, panelists cautioned that inherent diversity of VoIP technologies made “one-size-fits-all” approaches unworkable. Jeff Carlisle, FCC Wireline Bureau deputy chief, said regulators should be careful to determine whether public interest would be furthered by applying regulation to new technologies such as VoIP: “The first question is why regulate it? What would regulation further and would it retard development?” Wayne Fonteix, AT&T dir.-state public affairs, said regulatory policies based on traditional jurisdictional lines didn’t fit VoIP and would be unsustainable. He doubted that policymakers could “draw a meaningful line between the traditional switched telephone network and the IP cloud.”

Rick Cimerman, NCTA senior state policy dir., said VoIP was “nascent service” that shouldn’t be regulated until policymakers had had time and experience with it. He said VoIP was in its infancy and it was too soon to make policy decisions about whether it must be regulated. Larry Sarjeant, USTA gen. counsel, said key question in deciding whether regulators had jurisdiction over VoIP was whether it was common carrier service. Once that has been determined, he said, policymakers can decide whether it needs to be regulated. If VoIP becomes widespread, panelists said, FCC may have to consider whether VoIP must help support universal service. Cimerman said VoIP providers should be required to pay into universal service funds when VoIP displaced regular phone service, but Fonteix said providers should be assessed if they received number assignments from N. American Numbering Plan.

National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI) said survey of consumers showed telecom industry’s pricing and service barely merited “C-” grade in eyes of its customers. NRRI, policy research arm of NARUC, reported to meeting on results of national survey of 18,800 Internet users in Jan. that sought their opinions on service they received from utilities and other service industries. Survey report compared telecom industry segments with each other and with other service industries. Local telecom service received 1.87 grade point average (GPA), while long distance and cellular got 1.78, barely qualifying for C minus. Cable received 1.66 or “D+” grade and ranked below insurance industry and car dealers.. No industry got “B” in consumer survey. Best score was 2.25 grade (straight “C") by banking industry, followed by 2.14 for ISPs and hospitals. An “A” was 4.0 and “D” was 1.0.

FTC official in charge of new national no-call telemarketing list told state regulators agency was cooperating fully with states in developing national “no- call” list and said new federal list would remove burden from states that wanted to cease running their own lists. Eileen Harrington, FTC associate dir. in charge of national no-call implementation, said creation of national registry shouldn’t be disturbing to similar state efforts, but she acknowledged that “harmonizing” federal and state no-call efforts could take several years. She said federal no-call list could help crack down on offending telemarketers, there was “massive noncompliance” with state no-call laws, and relatively few telemarketers in any state purchased state’s list. Margaret Egler, FTC deputy consumer affairs chief, said FCC and NARUC would participate in implementing national no-call list: “The more people we have enforcing this, the better.” FTC intends to start taking names for national list by July 1 and enforce it as of Oct. 1.

NARUC board approved 5 telecom resolutions from its policy committees that: (1) Called for federal-state joint conference to address jurisdictional and intercarrier compensation issues arising from spread of VoIP telephony. (2) Supported industry and policymakers that encouraged deployment of Wi-Fi and other innovative wireless broadband technologies. (3) Urged FCC to develop minimum requirements for exchange of customer account information when users changed carriers. (4) Urged FCC to take specific steps to ensure wireless number portability was implemented by Nov. deadline in areas where process hadn’t already started. (5) Called on all states to participate in 2 national programs to facilitate and secure emergency responder communications during disasters.