States, competitive carriers and Sprint Nextel oppose an Embarq r...
States, competitive carriers and Sprint Nextel oppose an Embarq request to extend cost-assignment rules forbearance to all price cap-regulated incumbent local exchange carriers, they said in reply comments to a request by Qwest and Verizon. The proceeding’s initial comments…
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(CD June 30 p2) dealt only with requests to extend AT&T forbearance to the other two Bells, but Embarq’s comments widened the debate to include other carriers. The FCC should make no “blanket grant” of forbearance, as Embarq has suggested, said the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates. “A review of each company’s situation is clearly needed, and companies should not be able to pick and choose which rules they will follow.” Meanwhile, carriers dissected the request. “Embarq’s request is flawed in form and substance, fails to establish that Embarq is similarly situated with AT&T, and its grant would only exacerbate the multiple problems associated with the AT&T order,” Sprint, CompTel, Integra Telecom and TW Telecom said in joint reply comments. The FCC should ignore the Embarq request because it was neither filed as a separate pleading nor labeled a “petition for forbearance,” said the carriers. Embarq has a petition seeking relief from Automated Reporting Management Information System (ARMIS) requirements that also deals with accounting, but the carrier never sought forbearance from cost-assignment rules, they said. If the FCC does consider the request, it should deny, they said. Embarq isn’t “regulated in the same way that AT&T is regulated” under the cost-assignment rules, they said. Unlike AT&T, Embarq gets Universal Service Fund high-cost support, and it isn’t subject purely to price-cap regulation, they said, citing rate-of-return regulation in New Jersey and Oregon. Frontier Communications, like Embarq a mid-sized ILEC, seconded Embarq’s request, adding that no more petitions need be filed to get relief. “Nothing in the Act requires the Commission to limit forbearance to the carrier filing a petition,” and nothing “prevents the Commission from granting forbearance on its own motion in appropriate circumstances even if no petition is filed,” it said.