AT&T Accuses Comcast of Hypocrisy on Special Access
AT&T accused Comcast of hypocrisy. The cable company had asked the FCC to eliminate special access rules, so competitive telcos can charge the same access rates as incumbents’ plain old telephone service terminations use, as long the CLEC provides a phone number from the number portability database. “The implication of this proposal is that as long as a CLEC provides the telephone number, it’s safe to conclude that the CLEC provides a service equivalent to all of the other functions -- and the associated costs -- included in access charges,” AT&T Vice President Hank Hultquist said on his company’s website Friday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
CLECs can provide “many services” for phone numbers without actually terminating a call, including eFax and single-number services like Google Voice, Hultquist said. “Leaving aside these absurd results, Comcast’s support for this rule change casts a shadow over their advocacy against common carrier regulation of their broadband IP network,” he wrote. “In effect, Comcast is arguing that it should be able to file a tariff that includes functionalities ultimately performed by their broadband IP network, which is not part of Comcast’s CLEC entity. Again, they want to charge for services they do not actually perform.” Neither Comcast nor its trade association commented.
"This slope is so slippery that Comcast may never again be able to stand up a reasonable argument against regulation of their broadband IP network,” Hultquist said Friday. “If Comcast concedes that the FCC can subject packet-switching and IP signaling to tariff regulation, then how can Comcast consistently assert that the FCC lacks authority over Internet peering disputes, like theirs with Level 3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Level 3 agrees with Comcast on this issue and has already filed a tariff that incorporates this concept so they can start collecting for services they do not perform."
AT&T sent a letter to the FCC Friday raising similar points. If the cable operator’s request is granted, a “regulatory door would be thrown wide open to massive arbitrage schemes by CLECs seeking to gin-up inflated access charges on PSTN-to-IP call flows, countless disputes over who owes what to whom, and costly litigation among ILECs, CLECs, VoIP providers, and IXCs to sort out the mess,” wrote AT&T Senior Vice President Robert Quinn. It would also “arbitrarily tilt the regulatory playing field in favor of Comcast’s preferred technology (VoIP) and against the technology deployed by many of its competitors (wireless),” he said. Because the FCC hasn’t put Comcast’s request out for comment, the commission “has not sufficiently vetted this proposal and thus is in no position to comprehend all of its implications,” Quinn wrote.