Cable Companies Back Telecom Rate for Pole Attachments
Many cable companies backed a “telecom rate” for pole attachments last week, as the FCC got set to vote April 7 on an order that could lower rates some attachers pay to utilities (CD March 9 p5). Bright House Networks, Charter Communications and Comcast were among those that held lobbying meetings with agency officials, filings in docket 07-245 show. Comcast said it backs the rate formula in a rulemaking notice, and its conclusion that the telecom rate is consistent with Section 224 of the Communications Act. The company said it’s concerned about proposals to change unauthorized attachment and safety violation standards. Currently, telco pole attachment rates are often higher than cable rates.
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"The evidence in the record did not support revision of either of these two Commission policies,” Comcast said an executive told aides to Commissioners Meredith Baker and Mignon Clyburn. Charter, which also backed a pole attachment rate that’s nearly the same for all, said the current telecom formula, “along with regulatory uncertainty over its applicability, has resulted in excessive rates, protracted disputes and created barriers to broadband deployment.” By “contrast,” the “cable rate formula has facilitated billions of dollars in investment by cable operators,” Charter said. It reported on meetings an executive and a representative of the State Cable Associations and Operators had with aides to Commissioners Michael Copps and Baker and Clyburn.
The agency’s proposal to set the telecom rate at the “higher of the cable service rate or the lower-end telecom service rate” would generally make the cable fee the standard one, Bright House said. “Section 224(b) requires that all pole attachment rates must be ‘just and reasonable’ and subsection (d)(1) defines” that, the operator said, “by establishing a zone within which a reasonable Commission rate must fall.” A lawyer for Bright House spoke with FCC officials in a phone call it said was organized by the FCC General Counsel’s office.
Lowering pole attachment rates would be “by far the most important step the Commission could take in this proceeding,” USTelecom and National Telecommunications Cooperative Association lobbyists told Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett and other staff in a joint meeting, USTelecom said in an ex parte notice released on the FCC website Friday. “Failure to do so would not only be affirmatively harmful to continued rural broadband deployment, but would also impose unnecessary costs on the Commission’s proposed Connect America Fund and leave rural America paying broadband costs that are unnecessarily higher than in urban and suburban areas of the country,” the lobbyists said in their Wednesday meeting. “Indeed, an increased disparity between the pole attachment rates paid by cable and CLEC attachers, and those paid by ILECs, will simply serve to accentuate the differences in broadband accessibility in rural area when compared to urban/suburban areas.”