Enforcement Needed to Solve Rural Call Completion Problems, Observers Say
The rural call completion order is a good start, but it won’t do much on its own to combat the rural call completion problem, say attorneys and industry observers we interviewed. To be effective, the FCC will need to take enforcement actions, they said. A further notice, with its focus on intermediate providers, offers more hope for solving the problem, attorneys said. The text of the order and attached FNPRM was released Friday.
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The rules will need to be paired with effective enforcement, said Michael Romano, senior vice president-policy at the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association. But he said NTCA is “grateful” for the commission’s actions, and hopes that the reporting and data retention mechanisms give the agency useful tools to “help isolate bad actors or negligence in the routing of calls.” NTCA plans to watch the safe harbor and waiver process very closely, Romano said. “For the order to be successful, those must become effective incentives for good behavior and better call routing, rather than becoming loopholes that merely allow substandard routing practices to continue undetected.” The order lets companies get a waiver from some of the requirements if they can show they are abiding by best practices published by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions.
The recordkeeping, reporting and retention requirements are “burdensome” for the carriers that must comply with them, said Cassandra Heyne, senior analyst-regulatory affairs at John Staurulakis Inc. But the data are “extremely valuable for the FCC to make effective enforcement actions and gain a better understanding of the problems,” she said. Heyne said she’s “hopeful” the order will be a positive step toward eradicating rural call completion problems, but she’s still concerned the problems could continue to occur for some time “in the absence of significant enforcement actions while the FCC collects and analyzes the data.”
It will be a while before the rules take effect, observers said. The rules won’t take effect until the Office of Management and Budget gives its Paperwork Reduction Act approval. One ILEC official told us he wouldn’t be surprised if some parties challenged the data reporting requirements there. “Think about what they're doing here,” he said: The agency is asking initial long-distance providers to create a database of “every single long-distance call attempt made on your network, just to try to figure out whether this really small percentage of calls is somehow falling through the cracks.” It “seems like a bit of a sledgehammer,” he said.
The burden for interexchange carriers doesn’t lie in storing the data, he said; it’s in creating the capability to record the data in the first place. Class 4 long-distance switches are old pieces of equipment that can record information on completed calls but not on attempted calls, he said. Those switches would have to be modified to record call attempts, he said, and that’s expensive. Meanwhile, with the IP transition under way, “these switches are on their way out."
Most people would have liked to see some requirements for intermediate providers, said attorney Tony Veach of Bennet and Bennet, who represents rural ILECs. Some type of certification, like those proposed in the FNPRM, would have been helpful, he said. “After all, they are who everyone thinks are the bad actors, right? Why not at least include some minimal rules for them too?” To really be effective, the FCC needs to “come out and slam another carrier like it did to Level 3,” Bennet said. That would show that “these new rules have teeth."
It’s not clear that reporting requirements will affect behavior right away, but they will let the FCC develop a record to address specific practices, said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge. Feld said he wishes the reported data would be made public: “It is unfortunate that the commission will continue the practice of keeping critical infrastructure information like this confidential. Nothing in this should require disclosure of commercial sensitive information -- it merely requires disclosure of potentially embarrassing information for providers that do a lousy job completing calls.” That’s precisely the kind of information it’s most useful to make public if the agency really believes in substituting “market mechanisms” for regulation, he said. It would allow consumers to “vote with their feet.” Instead, the commission “will once again bow to the pressure from carriers” to hide potentially embarrassing information as “proprietary,” he said. “It is a sorry world when the only way the FCC can get honest reports out of carriers is by promising to hide their sloppiness from their customers.”