ILECs Must Honor IP-to-IP Interconnection Regulation, CompTel CEO Tells NARUC

The goals of state regulators are “aligned” with CompTel on this issue, James said. He mentioned a petition of competitive carries filed before the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable last week (CD Feb 4 p7), which requested Verizon file any IP-to-IP interconnection agreements with the state regulator. The two main priorities James outlined were to “craft a clear path to the future” on ensuring this regulation for session initiation protocol interconnection and to preserve the copper network, which he called a “valuable national resource” that still serves many companies and consumers. That network “needs to be maintained with quality,” he added. Together these issues form strong consumer and competitive protections, he said.

"My expectations are that over the next period of time, however you define it, you will see more and more agreements reached without regulation for interconnection,” said AT&T Vice President-Federal Regulatory Hank Hultquist, speaking on a Sunday panel. “To get to an all-IP world, we have to have IP interconnection. It’s gotta work, it’s gotta happen. Whether that will require some form of regulation, whether that’s an extension of regulation we have today … is a topic for some debate."

Hultquist expanded on AT&T’s petition on methods of transitioning to an all-IP world and hope for deregulatory wire center testbed trials in panels on both Sunday and Monday. AT&T is not necessarily proposing “a quick transition to the IP world,” he said Monday afternoon, describing a desire for a transition in an “organized and managed” fashion to benefit both consumers and industry. “Of course we're going to engage with the state commissions,” he said of the wire center trials. AT&T hopes others, even if disagreeing about ideal trial designs, will urge that these trials go forward, he said. AT&T sees multiple phases to this trial and an eventual “timeline for over what period of time will we first grandfather existing services and at some later point, ultimately cease providing those services and mapping those services to successor services,” he said Sunday. Eventually legacy services will be expired but hopefully most people will have already transitioned to IP, he said: “You don’t want a large transition at the very end.” The decisions go beyond AT&T, he added Monday. Moving all the TDM connections into the IP space is a “huge undertaking” itself, he said. Hultquist, as he has in the past, spoke with caution about interconnection regulation: “We have our own view,” he said. “We'll see.” Wireless will be a leading indicator of whether his hypothesis on interconnection is true, he said, also mentioning the rise of voice over LTE.

"Sprint has actually asked for interconnection with ILECs around the country … and we've been denied,” said Sprint Nextel Senior Counsel Ken Shifman on the Sunday panel. Sprint’s already interconnected in IP before in some contexts but here has run into a challenge, he said. “How do we interconnect with those incumbents in IP?” he wondered. “We believe that interconnection should be technology-neutral."

"What I think is sort of bizarre about this particular transition is that it’s ‘let’s try deregulating and see what happens,'” said Victory Research Principal Sharon Gillett, a former FCC Wireline Bureau chief. “Interconnection is here to stay absent a change in the law,” said Christopher White, deputy rate counsel of the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel. NCTA Associate General Counsel Steve Morris described significant uncertainty about what AT&T envisions for how traffic will be handled and what interconnection will or won’t be in this new IP world. Joe Gillan, a CLEC consultant, advocated during the Monday panel for the traditional regulation: “The Act is quite elegant in its flexibility.”