Voice-Broadband Enthusiasts Should be Careful What They Wish For, Conference Call Executive Says
The public switched telephone network may be dwindling, but its intercarrier compensation regime has guaranteed high-quality voice service, and proponents of the broadband transition ought to take care that they don’t destroy service for the sake of their technological revolution, Free Conference Call CEO David Erickson said Tuesday. “We shouldn’t go out of our way to regulate out the old system just because some people on this call think it’s a dying business,” Erickson said in a conference call debate over the FCC’s proposed reforms of the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime. An AT&T executive said PSTN is quickly becoming a thing of the past, while the panel’s moderator said the transition away from that network is inevitable.
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"IP to IP networks lack all the regulations and economy that are in the traditional PSTN, Erickson said. “'Bill and keep’ is here -- it’s just not working as well as the ‘calling party pays’ system. The bill and keep system has not proliferated into any kind of great interconnection that allows me to get where I want to go.”
Customers may be moving toward VoIP, but those services can’t function without the PSTN, Erickson said, because services such as Skype or Yahoo don’t interconnect. Even if all calls move to broadband, third parties will still be required to help connect VoIP providers to each other because the companies won’t be eager to “share” their codes and information with competitors directly, Erickson said. “Skype is a great service … but Skype works as an island,” Erickson said. “It cuts into PSTN dramatically. But it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.” Crossfire Media co-founder Carl Ford agreed that the transition to VoIP is problematic. “I still don’t understand how to make the transition to broadband and … my big fear is 911 services,” he said. “I'm very afraid of how the next generation of 911 services is going to be paid for."
The old network “is on life support” and anyone who thinks it can be sustained “should explain” what they see happening to the network over the next five years, AT&T Vice President Hank Hultquist said. “Because what I project out is a system that will be a quarter of what it was in 1999.” Hultquist said ILECs have shed nearly half of their lines over the past decade. “And I just don’t think it’s sustainable,” he said. “My view is, we have to come up with a rational way to make that transition as least disruptive as we can.” Changing the intercarrier compensation regime will allow companies to innovate to come up with solutions, Hultquist said. “Engineers figure out how to make things work. I'm pretty sure that engineers can figure out how to make VoIP interconnect."
ZipDX CEO David Frankel said he thought the commission ought to work on ways of synthesizing “the best of both worlds. … If we're going to move into the 21st century and we want the voice network and the PSTN to serve us, we have to be very forward-looking and very cautious.”
Voice of the Net Coalition Executive Director Glenn Richards understands that the transition to broadband may not be complete now, but it’s inevitable, he said after the call, which he moderated. “There will always be people with rotary phones. … I can’t even buy cable for my dad. There’s always going to be non-adopters. But when a huge percentage of the under-30 population is learning to live without a wireline phone,” he asked, “what does that portend?”