Rural and price cap carriers have separately urged the FCC...

Fund reform order (CD Oct 28 p1), but NTCA went back to the FCC on Wednesday to add another concern, the group said in an ex parte filing (http://xrl.us/bmk48i). “NTCA observes upon review of Section 51.917 of the rules adopted in the recent Order that the Recovery Mechanism takes effect ‘[b]eginning July 1, 2012,’ while pursuant to Section 51.705(a), the default rates for intraMTA traffic would be reduced effective January 1, 2012. This appears to provide a six-month gap between a potential reduction in rates and the availability of any Recovery Mechanism.” In a separate letter, telecom attorney Karen Brinkman said she’s asking the commission to rethink moving to bill-and-keep for local traffic exchanges between incumbents and wireless carriers. Brinkman said she’s speaking on behalf of CenturyLink, FairPoint, Frontier and Windstream. The FCC has claimed in its order that wireless carriers that don’t have interconnection agreements aren’t paid for local traffic and that “most” large incumbents have already moved to $0.0007 or less for rates. “In fact, situations where the mid-sized price cap carriers lack interconnection agreements cover only a small portion of CMRS-LEC intraMTA traffic today,” Brinkman said. “For example, Windstream has 238 interconnection agreements with 81 CMRS providers and only exchanges traffic with 24 providers without an interconnection agreement. Frontier has 560 interconnection agreements with 61 CMRS providers and only exchanges traffic with 25 providers without an interconnection agreement.” Price cap carriers are also worried that the new rules are “unintentionally creating a new arbitrage opportunity at a time when it has pledged to eliminate ‘wasteful arbitrage schemes’ that cost consumers millions,” Brinkman said. “Because the rates for CMRS-LEC intraMTA traffic will not be reduced in accordance with the transition applicable to other types of traffic, dishonest carriers delivering traffic will be motivated to classify that traffic as CMRS-LEC intraMTA traffic. Such schemes will result in revenue losses above and beyond the losses projected above. While the new rules designed to combat phantom traffic are a step in the right direction, they will not help when terminating carriers receive such traffic indirectly and have no way of verifying that it is indeed CMRS-originated."