STATES SAY THEY'RE READY TO GRAPPLE WITH FCC'S UNE REFERRALS
With release of the FCC’s Triennial Review order on network unbundling policy said to be imminent, state regulators believe they're about to see the fruit of their months of preparation for addressing unbundled network element platforms (UNE-Ps) and the other complex network unbundling issues that the FCC order is referring to the states.
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“We've been preparing for this day [the order’s release] for months,” said Tex. PUC Chmn. Rebecca Klein, who’s leading the Triennial Review Implementation Project (TRIP), a multistate task force formed through NARUC a few days after the FCC’s Feb. 20 announcement. She said the TRIP group had been working for 5 months to set up communication and information-sharing channels, with the TRIP group acting as a central point of contact for states to coordinate their efforts to address UNE issues arising from the Triennial Review. The TRIP group also will be a vehicle for state collaborations on a regional or other basis, she said. “There are a few more things we can do to prepare ourselves,” Klein said, “but we're ready to make the big leap forward” and get into the particulars of the actual order.
In addition to the TRIP group’s work, at least 10 states have begun formal or informal proceedings to define the state-specific procedural, technical and legal issues that will affect implementation of the Triennial Review order -- Hawaii, Ia., Kan., Ky., Mo., Mont., N.C., N.M., N.Y., Tex. Several other states say they have begun laying the groundwork for addressing Triennial Review issues within the context of existing UNE or intrastate competition dockets. The remaining states are planning to open Triennial Review dockets as soon as the order is released.
The FCC said the state commissions would have 9 months from the effective date of the order to conduct a granular analysis of whether unbundled local switching was necessary for competition in each state. That is where the states will determine whether the hot-cut processes for switching loops from one local carrier to another are sufficiently mature to do away with unbundled switching. If a state determines unbundled switching isn’t necessary for competition, there would be a 3-year phase-out for carriers to transition from UNE-P service, which depends on unbundled local switching. If the state decided switching was necessary, then it (and UNE-P) would remain indefinitely. The FCC order also gave the states 90 days from the order’s effective date to rebut the FCC’s presumption that local switching and UNE-P aren’t necessary for competition in the big-business market segment where customers use circuits at the 1.5 Mbps DS-1 rate and above.
The states actually will get a few extra weeks for their analyses. The 90-day and 9-month clocks don’t start running until 30 days after the order is published in the Federal Register, Klein said. The states will get another 2 or 3 weeks while the lengthy order is edited and formatted for official publication. Klein said the states were planning to take advantage of the additional time. She said a group of about 20 state staffers from around the country stood ready to write a detailed summary of the order as soon as it was released, with each member of the group summarizing a different part. After being verified for accuracy, those parts will be combined. The summation will take about 2 weeks to complete, Klein said. The summary will then go to each state. He said that would save much time compared with having each state do its own summary of the order and would ensure that all the states worked from the same source material.
The states also will be holding an extended technical workshop on the UNE order July 27 in conjunction with the NARUC summer meeting in Denver, with speakers representing all the major stakeholder groups. TRIP task force members at NARUC also will be talking with the various regional regulatory conferences about the possibilities for approaching certain UNE market issues on a regional basis. The TRIP members have been holding weekly conference calls so the members and technical staffs are kept current on developments.
Among other preparations, the TRIP task force for the last 2 months has been circulating decision point lists among incumbent telcos, CLECs and other major stakeholder groups, inviting them to specify the substantive concerns and issues that the states will need to address in their UNE market analyses. The parties also have been urged to establish their general positions in advance of the Triennial Review order’s release. State staffers said the preparation work done by the states through TRIP and individually over the last few months would be instrumental in making the difficult task feasible.