Carriers urged the FCC to mandate captioned telephone relay servi...

matter. “While CTS is currently a valuable form of [telecom relay service], it will likely become more valuable in the future, as the demographics of the United States continue to shift to a population with a greater percentage of senior citizens,” the company said. Sprint Nextel said the FCC already has a sufficient record supporting a CTS mandate, and issuing a rulemaking notice would only cause further delay. CTS is “the only functionally equivalent PSTN-based TRS service for individuals ‘who become hearing impaired later in life,'” and the lack of a CTS mandate “has produced some untoward effects,” the company said. Three states refuse to make the service available for intrastate and interstate calling, while others restrict availability to hard-of-hearing citizens and impose conditions “contrary to the TRS standards which the FCC has found are necessary to achieve [functional] equivalency,” it said. And at least one state wants to impose a condition on CTS providers “that will all but destroy the transparency of CTS,” it said. However, the California Public Utilities Commission said it opposed “another federal mandate which likely would require California to raise its surcharge on end-user billings in a time of great fiscal crisis for this state.” California “fully intends to continue to provide CTS at the pace we have set for deploying the service,” but could only support a mandate if “the FCC intends also to ensure full federal payment of all CTS costs the states will incur,” the commission said.