Today’s intercarrier compensation regime discourages broadband de...
Today’s intercarrier compensation regime discourages broadband deployment and promotes access charge arbitrage, AT&T said Thursday. The Bell wants comprehensive intercarrier compensation reform, and filed a proposal for that with the FCC. Agency rules focus “on a rapidly obsolescing POTS…
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network architecture and business model,” said Bob Quinn, AT&T federal regulatory senior vice president, in a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. These controls “retard the inevitable transition from a narrow-band, voice-centric infrastructure to the broadband, any-application infrastructure of the 21st century,” he added. The FCC should harmonize termination rates for all carriers, AT&T said, also endorsing FCC use of a comparability benchmark to facilitate nationwide comparable end-user rates. Using a benchmark would protect states that have lowered intrastate access rates and created state high- cost universal service funds, AT&T said. The FCC should act fast to overhaul intercarrier compensation, AT&T said. The compensation issue is fragmented into multiple proceedings -- including ISP-bound traffic, traffic pumping and phantom traffic, among others -- unsettling the marketplace, it said. If the FCC ignores comprehensive reform this year, “it will have no choice but to keep applying regulatory band-aids as each new intercarrier compensation problem arises or, more realistically, long after each problem has arisen and has caused significant damage,” Quinn said. If the FCC rejects comprehensive reform, AT&T said, it should grant an AT&T petition for declaratory ruling and waiver related to VoIP compensation, also filed Thursday. AT&T wants the FCC to declare, on an “interim” basis, that carriers may collect access charges from telecom companies serving VoIP providers, “as long as the calls appear to be ‘interexchange,'” and “the charges are not higher than the terminating carrier’s tariffed interstate switched access rates, it said. AT&T also wants the FCC to allow AT&T and “similarly situated carriers to offset the reductions they make in intrastate terminating rates to achieve parity with interstate rate levels by waiving certain price cap rules to allow increases in federal subscriber line charges,” it said. The petition offers “middleground” between two conflicting forbearance petitions filed by Embarq and Feature Group IP (CD Feb 20 p14), an AT&T spokesman said.