Lobbying Continues on USF, Intercarrier Comp Reforms
The disparate lobbying on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reform has continued even as industry-wide consensus building talks press on. Last week, executives from mid-sized carriers CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream joined an analyst from CostQuest on a conference call with commission staff to lobby on Universal Service Fund reform, CenturyLink said in an ex parte notice released Monday in docket 10-90. The telco executives urged “immediate adoption of reforms that would redistribute ongoing support within price cap carriers’ areas based on cost conditions in individual wire centers, rather than costs averaged across study areas or entire states,” the ex parte said. “We also explained how a regression analysis could enable prompt identification of the relative costs to serve price cap carriers’ individual wire centers,” the ex parte said. CostQuest has recently been retained to help industry come up with cost models as companies and trade associations try to come up with an industry endorsed universal service reform package (CD June 6 p1).
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In separate meetings, executives of Hargray Telephone met with Chairman Julius Genachowski’s wireline adviser Zac Katz and the wireline advisers to the three commissioners, as well as Wireline Bureau staffers, to lobby on universal service, Hargray said in its own ex parte notice. “The discussions focused on an alternative solution for the high-cost Universal Service Fund program,” Hargray said in its notice. The alternative proposal “would freeze 2011 high-cost USF revenue requirements for participants on a per access line and per broadband line basis,” Hargray said. “In future years, participants would receive support for voice lines frozen on a per line basis at 2011 levels. … Due to declining trends in voice access lines, only those carriers that are aggressively building out infrastructure and delivering affordable broadband to their residents and businesses will be able to sustain levels of support at or near their current levels.” Hargray said its “proposal not only controls the growth of the program and reorients the USF program to support affordable 21st century telecommunications -- where consumers want them and priced to spur adoption -- but it eases significantly the administrative burden associated with the program for fund administrators and recipients.”
Also last week, ITS Telecommunications Systems executives met with Angela Kronenberg, adviser to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. ITS said its “top-line revenue would be severely impacted and that significant capital investment was made premised on existing support mechanisms,” according to the company’s ex parte notice, also released Monday. “Commission support was encouraged for a transition period sufficient to amortize present loan commitments, a cap on corporate operations costs rather than elimination, ongoing support for operations in addition to capital, treatment of [voice over Internet protocol] as a telecommunications service for intercarrier compensation and a process to allow carriers to turn off carriers that perform rate arbitrage and do not pay for reciprocal compensation.”