AT&T’s Proposal for IP Transition Proceeding Unnecessary Distraction, CLECs Say
A group of CLECs criticized AT&T’s petition for the FCC to consider eliminating various legacy rules, arguing it’s meant to “distract” the commission from its true policy challenge: updating the agency’s competition policies to ensure that competitors can obtain ILEC last-mile facilities and interconnection on reasonable rates, terms and conditions. An AT&T executive told us the company’s petition was meant to open a dialogue.
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The National Broadband Plan directed the FCC to “lay the foundation for America’s broadband future” by promoting competition in the wholesale wireline market, wrote Willkie Farr attorney Thomas Jones, on behalf of his CLEC clients Cbeyond, EarthLink, Integra Telecom and tw telecom (http://xrl.us/bn46xx). Jones quoted from the plan, which criticized the agency’s current regulatory framework as a “hodgepodge of wholesale access rights and pricing mechanisms” that lacked a consistent analytical framework.
But AT&T’s proposal to establish a proceeding to facilitate a transition to packet-mode networks (CD Nov 8 p11) ignored the need to update competition policies as part of that transition, the CLECs said. ILECs will still have control over the “bottleneck” facilities when communications move to packet-mode, just as they do under TDM, the CLECs said. AT&T’s proposal to conduct a “regulatory experiment,” in which individual wire centers would see an elimination of Section 214 discontinuance requirements and other “outdated” regulations, “would be affirmatively harmful because it is completely unnecessary, would be extremely time-consuming, and would divert scarce FCC resources away from the more important work of updating competition policies,” Jones told us. “It prevents the Commission from doing its job. In this case, not doing its job will yield less competition, investment and innovation."
AT&T tried to structure its filing in a way to “initiate a discussion,” said AT&T Vice President Bob Quinn. No one has ever taken an individual wire center -- let alone a market footprint -- from TDM to IP, he said. Like the industry transition to DTV was tested in a specific market before being done more broadly, the IP transition would also benefit by working through possible operational and technological issues in small chunks, he said.
The CLECs also questioned the need for an omnibus proceeding to deal with the transition. Virtually every one of the policies AT&T wants the agency to address is “already the subject of pending FCC proceedings,” they said. The National Telecommunications Cooperative Association also unnecessarily called for an omnibus proceeding, the CLECs said. “Consumer protection and universal service issues are clearly important, but the Commission is already considering them in pending rulemaking and forbearance proceedings."
"This is really about trying to figure out how to finish the migration that’s occurring,” Quinn told us. “Logic would dictate that we have to do something in a more comprehensive approach, rather than a disaggregated approach” in 37 different open proceedings, he said. But Quinn said he understands Jones’ logic: “If I were billing $500/hour, I would want to do it in 37 different dockets too.” The FCC should use an “efficiency model,” not a “litigation model,” he said.
"I certainly understand Mr. Quinn’s logic,” Jones responded. Jones said that, “like AT&T,” if he wanted to divert FCC resources away from the important work of updating its competition policies for a packet-mode environment, he would “urge the Commission to initiate a massive, largely redundant and unnecessary rulemaking proceeding rather than initiate proceedings narrowly tailored to actual public policy challenges.” Quinn is right that the commission should use an “efficiency model,” but that means avoiding a “redundancy model,” he said.
There seems to be a consensus as to the proper direction for regulatory review, said NCTA’s Michael Romano, senior vice president-policy. “There may just be some misunderstanding about the process,” he told us. NTCA’s petition proposed a comprehensive and “holistic” review of the regulatory framework “to see what fits and what does not” in an all-IP world, he said. That would be part of a rulemaking. But in advance of that, the commission could take several steps to provide certainty for those looking to provide investments in IP technologies, he said.
The issues of service discontinuance and equal access would “probably be best” dealt with in a comprehensive rulemaking, Romano said. But in the near term, before such a proceeding, the FCC could implement rules incentivizing IP-to-IP interconnection for the exchange of voice traffic; figure out how to provide more predictable and sufficient support for standalone broadband; and offer universal service support for middle-mile facilities, he said. “We probably have some slight differences of opinion” about where in the process various issues should be addressed, he said. “But directionally we're walking toward a similar destination.”