AT&T, CLECs, Debate Whether Physical Connection is Necessary to be an ‘End-Office Switch’
AT&T and CLECs traded barbs at the FCC over the precise definition of “end-office switching,” and whether that’s what CLECs and their VoIP partners are doing when they route calls between the public switched telephone network and over-the-top VoIP providers. Level 3 and Bandwidth.com have argued they're entitled to assess end-office switching charges. But AT&T said in an ex parte filing Thursday that courts, the industry and the commission have long established that the defining characteristic of an end-office switch is the physical connection of subscriber lines and trunks. A Level 3 executive told us there is a “significant” amount of money at stake.
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Level 3 and Bandwidth.com, which have made a series of ex parte filings pushing for the charges, “do not provide end office switching,” AT&T said. “Rather, the CLECs simply dump the calls at issue in an undifferentiated stream onto the public Internet, over which they may travel for hundreds or even thousands of miles and over the facilities of multiple Internet backbone providers and ISPs before their ultimate delivery to the premises (or mobile device) where the over-the-top VoIP application is being used.” AT&T said the CLEC and VoIP providers’ arguments are based on an “incomplete and misleading description of the very limited role” their companies play in the routing of VoIP-PSTN calls.
"Obviously we disagree with AT&T,” said Michael Shortley, Level 3 vice president of legal. The FCC said in its Connect America Fund order that CLECs are entitled to charge for the functionality they provide themselves or in conjunction with a VoIP provider, he said. That’s something Level 3 had been asking for during the pleading cycle leading up to the CAF order. After ongoing disputes, Level 3 seeks clarification that the functions provided by the CLEC and its VoIP partner are, in fact, end-office switching, he said. The core function of an end-office switch is setting up and taking down calls, Shortley said. “That is exactly what Level 3 and its VoIP partners do with a VoIP-originated or VoIP-terminated call.”
FCC rules prohibit the CLECs from assessing end-office charges, AT&T said, because they don’t have facilities that connect trunks to loops. CLECs and VoIP providers just provide an intermediate link, which is “more akin to interexchange transiting service” than end office switching, AT&T said. They don’t take calls from trunks and place them onto subscriber lines, the telco said. “They take voice packets and pass them in bulk in an undifferentiated stream onto the public Internet.” The only routing the CLECs do is sending the packets toward the nearest peering point with an Internet backbone provider, AT&T said. “If this is the functional equivalent of ‘end office switching,’ then the term has lost all meaning."
AT&T is “confusing the functions of the end-office switch,” Shortley said. The functions of the switch are not defined in the Communications Act, but are defined in various places throughout FCC regulation, he said. An FCC accounting order around the time of the 1996 Telecom Act listed a series of factors that define what an end-office switch does, he said. The purpose of that order was to determine where various investments went, he said, but the definition is telling here. “You boil them down, it really is setting up and taking down calls,” he said. “That function is not performed by the broadband provider. It’s performed by the CLEC and the VoIP provider.”