Cable Objects to Special Access Paperwork Burden

The special access data request “raises a variety of concerns under the PRA,” said NCTA (http://bit.ly/17keH1P). It would require operators to provide detailed information on every rate they have charged to every commercial customer in the U.S. for every month of 2010 and 2012, plus “a host of additional information” that would be “incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce,” the association said. “The net result is a data request that will prove overwhelming for the 6000 companies that must respond to it and that is likely to stretch the Commission’s analytical capabilities and resources beyond the breaking point.” NCTA estimated some individual companies will need to spend tens of thousands of hours of employee time, and millions of dollars of labor and other costs, responding to the request.

ACA, with about 850 small-cable operator members, said between 100 and 150 of them provided dedicated services or best efforts services to business customers, and will need to respond to the data collection (http://bit.ly/17EHAZp). The 134-hour average estimate given by the FCC is “significantly below” the expected time to collect the data, based on members ACA has sampled, the association said. The real number is likely at least 500 hours, with an average cost to respond of about $50,000 per each small operator, ACA said. “It is especially troublesome since these small operators did not request the Commission’s examination of the special access market, and few, if any, who compete in this market, will benefit from any Commission regulation of special access services."

Pioneer Cellular, Cross Telephone, Cellular One of East Central Illinois and Nex-Tech Wireless strongly objected to the “vast scope” of the mandatory data collection, saying it contravenes “good public policy” and violates the PRA (http://bit.ly/Z0Zanm). The proposed data collection imposes “an enormous burden and substantial cost on small carriers that are purchasers of special access that is utterly disproportionate to any possible public benefit,” the carriers said. They proposed that any carrier that buys less than $5 million annually in special access facilities in price-cap areas be exempt from the collection requirements. “The Joint Commenters [cost for] use of special access facilities, which is far less than $5 million annually, constitutes an almost infinitesimal level of spending on special access facilities,” they said. “The burden of producing such data is wholly disproportionate to the public interest in obtaining such data. Further, the practical utility of such data is close to zero."

Several CLECs said the FCC’s burden estimate of 134 hours is “generally accurate,” and justified by the “practical utility” of the data request (http://bit.ly/15iPDf8). BT Americas, CBeyond, EarthLink, Integra, Level 3 and tw telecom said jointly that the data request order was “long overdue,” and the information gathered can help reverse the “substantial harm” that has been “inflicted” on the U.S. economy. Tw telecom estimated 115-130 hours to respond to the data request, which includes time to gather the data from its systems, supplement and “scrub” the data, supply requested network maps, provide GPS information, and give narrative responses where needed, the CLECs said. BT estimated 100-120 hours. Integra estimated 260 hours and EarthLink estimated 320 hours. In any case, the overall burden is significantly lower than the large estimates provided by ILECs, said the CLECs. Verizon’s preliminary estimate of more than 15,000 hours seems designed to “bolster its advocacy against employing a market power analysis,” and CenturyLink’s estimate of 40,000 hours “hardly seems credible,” the CLECs said.

AT&T said the collection of data on all providers’ special access facilities satisfies the PRA’s “usefulness, timeliness and necessity” requirements. But the proposed demand for pricing information violates the PRA, it said (http://bit.ly/ZYGcJr). Where the commission asks special access providers to compile “extensively detailed information, at circuit and rate-element levels for each month in both 2010 and 2012,” at “every building and location in the country,” it clearly violates the PRA, the telco said. “Location-specific prices sought by the proposed requests simply do not exist for most special access arrangements,” AT&T said. “As a practical matter, the lack of location-specific prices, and the inconsistencies, gaps, and outliers among the various providers’ pricing data would inevitably result in a data set that is not of ‘practical utility.'”