The FCC reportedly is close to voting down AT&T’s petition seekin...

in voting against the request. Adelstein reportedly had concerns about the petition’s legality. An option would have been to include the AT&T petition in the VoIP rulemaking that was initiated at the agenda meeting Thurs., but that didn’t happen, one source said. The problem is there’s “no good answer to the universal service concern” raised by AT&T’s petition, an FCC insider said. Meanwhile, a group of midsize telecom companies mostly serving rural areas urged the FCC to “act promptly” and deny an AT&T petition seeking exemption from paying access charges on phone-to-phone IP services. “This traffic is clearly telecommunications traffic subject to access charges under existing FCC precedent because there is no net protocol conversion between the originating and terminating points of the call,” the companies wrote last week in 2 identical letters to FCC Comrs. Martin and Abernathy. The letters were signed by CenturyTel, Commonwealth Telephone Enterprises, Consolidated Communications, CT Communications, D&E Communications, FairPoint, Iowa Telecom, SureWest, TDS Telecom, TXU Communications and Valor Telecom. The companies said how their networks originated and terminated calls for AT&T had “not changed, only the way AT&T transports a call over its own network [had] changed.” They warned the commissioners that “allowing AT&T to engage in self-help by withholding access payments” ran counter to FCC policies and the “certainty that [they] need to attract investment in their networks and promote universal service.” They said they were “concerned” the Commission’s failure to act quickly on the petition would pressure other carriers into “taking self-help measures similar to those taken by AT&T.” They also warned the FCC that “allowing this practice to continue [risked] undermining other regulatory policies such as E911 and CALEA” and had the “potential of interfering with the collection of monies for public policy funds, such as universal service.” The companies urged the FCC to reaffirm that the traffic described in the AT&T petition was subject to access charges and deny the petition.