FCC Should Set ‘Date Certain’ for End of PSTN, Panelist Urges
The FCC should learn from the problems of the DTV transition and set a “date certain” for the end of the public switched telephone network regime, Consumer Federation of America Research Director Marc Cooper said Wednesday. “The big mistake [with DTV] was we let the holdouts set the date and set the time,” Cooper said in a series of panel discussions at the FCC. “There are people who will be reluctant, there will people who will need protection during the transition, but they shouldn’t be allowed to set the date. That date is a drop-dead date. That’s what we need in this space."
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Cooper’s comments drew immediate resistance from industry officials on the panel, including Verizon Vice President David Young. “There’s no reason to artificially pick a date,” he said. “We're already three-quarters of the way through the PSTN transition. These devices, they're there already. The cable industry and their tens of millions of customers, they're there already. But there are sort of the remnant pieces of the PSTN … that may continue to do a fine job for decades. Those things will naturally go of their own accord when no one thinks there’s value in encouraging people to use them."
Cooper received support from University of Wisconsin telecom professor Gregg Vanderheiden. A deadline shouldn’t be the “date we throw the switch” and shut off the old network, but all regulatory efforts ought to focus on getting customers off “the tail,” he said. He suggested that regulators and policy makers should set up “some kind of termination fund” because the last remnants of the PSTN are going to be very expensive. “Whoever is on that tail … is going to be at a very sharply declining disadvantage,” Vanderheiden said.
The transition is already getting critical on parts of the old network, telecom consultant Rich Shockey said. “The existing class 4, class 5 infrastructure is now well beyond its life cycle,” Shockey said, echoing comments he made at an Illinois Institute of Technology conference in October (CD Oct 11 p11). “There actually is a public safety issue that’s relevant in this transition.”
Public safety was a constant refrain at Wednesday’s forum. Audience members and panelists reminded FCC officials about building codes, for instance, that require building alarms to be wired for automatic emergency alerts to fire and ambulance service.
Carnegie Mellon engineering and public policy professor Jon Peha said he didn’t think the transition could be complete without some kind of standards for outage reporting. “If you're going to have providers competing over who is providing the most reliable service, it would be good to know who actually had the more reliable service,” he said. Peha acknowledged that it would be difficult for telcos to measure quality-of-service based on their customers’ subjective experiences. The FCC has already grappled with the question but has faced stiff resistance from industry (CD Nov 23 p3).
Consultant Joe Gillan disagreed with Cooper’s argument for a deadline, saying that the transition is already under way and that the old and new systems are likely to coexist for a while. “Every time I hear the hard date argument, I keep thinking … we must be talking about different things,” Gillan said. “Because I can’t think of a single thing that has to be subject to a hard date."
Cooper was one of many panelists who reminded the audience that the PSTN wasn’t just its wires and switches but a social construct. Gesturing to telecom officials across the table from him, Cooper said, “The question exists when he wants to get rid of all this copper because it’s inefficient … and you say, ‘Wait a minute, I've built my business around it, will you transition all my rights and obligations with them?’ The rights and obligations have to transfer with them; otherwise people’s business models blow up.” Cooper said a “date certain” should be a deadline beyond which telecom customers can no longer expect to transfer interconnection and other PSTN “rights,” Cooper said.