The Mo. Court of Appeals, St. Louis, reversed and remanded a 2003 ...
The Mo. Court of Appeals, St. Louis, reversed and remanded a 2003 Mo. PSC decision to reject tariff amendments filed by a group of rural incumbent telcos that would have applied terminating access charges to all wireless calls terminating…
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in their local exchanges. The court said the PSC incorrectly applied federal law in rejecting the tariffs. The rural carriers had sought to amend their tariffs going forward and have access charges applied retroactively to Feb. 1998. The PSC rejected the tariffs, saying the wireless traffic was local, not interexchange, so access charges couldn’t apply. The PSC also said the tariffs conflicted with federal laws that established reciprocal compensation for intercarrier compensation on local calls. But wireless carriers protested that the PSC’s definition made local all wireless traffic within a major trading area (intraMTA), contrary to FCC rules that carried out the reciprocal compensation provisions of the Telecom Act. The Mo. appeals court in Case WD-62961 said federal law didn’t control this situation because the wireless carriers never started negotiations to establish local reciprocal compensation rates. The court said the rural telcos’ only recourse was to file access charge tariffs under state law, because they had no power under federal law to force wireless carriers into reciprocal compensation negotiations. The court turned against the PSC as it cited past PSC decisions that found application of intrastate access charges to intraMTA wireless traffic was an appropriate interim means for dealing with terminating local wireless traffic until other compensation arrangements could be put in place. The court said the PSC in this case didn’t offer any reasonable explanation for refusing to allow the rural telcos to collect access charges until local reciprocal compensation rates could be negotiated. The court remanded the case to the PSC for new hearings.