Wireless carriers other than AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which signed the ABC Plan for Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation reform, hope to win concessions as proposed changes to the program move forward at the FCC. With the wireless industry presenting a divided front, it’s unclear how much leverage smaller wireless carriers will have and what changes they will be able to push through at the commission.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s effort to issue another joint public statement by the FCC commissioners on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation system reform appeared to be in flux late Thursday, agency officials said. Genachowski had hoped to get his colleagues to sign another Web post, as they did in March. Then, the full commission had promised “a busy spring and summer” of reform work and a promise to move to order’s “within a few months” of the comment cycle’s end in May (CD March 16 p10). Commissioners apparently couldn’t agree on language in the proposed new post, the officials said. Efforts to reach Genachowski’s spokesman for comment were unsuccessful at deadline.

The House sponsors of last year’s Universal Service Fund overhaul bill support the FCC acting on the industry USF agreement brokered by USTelecom. Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., no longer plans to move USF legislation, aide Brad Schweer told us Wednesday. He said that Terry “will now be encouraging the FCC to produce details that reflect suggestions” proposed by the industry group. Terry’s former co-sponsor Rick Boucher agreed that the commission should move forward on its own.

A breakaway group of rural telcos organized a last-ditch effort to keep their trade associations from signing on to a USTelecom-brokered agreement on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms. “It is simply a bad deal for rural America!” said a draft letter circulated by the Rural Broadband Alliance’s Diane Smith and Stephen Kraskin.

The Universal Service Fund “is not materially increased by requiring very small companies to contribute,” the American Association of Paging Carriers said in a telephone conference with Wireline Bureau staff. The association “pointed out that the exemption level of $10,000 has remained unchanged since the USF was implemented as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996,” according to an ex parte released Thursday in docket 09-229. “AAPC further noted that some of its members include small companies with paging service revenues of less than $1 million,” the group said. “Using the 12% ’safe harbor’ interstate allocation allowed by the Commission, the contribution factor of 5.9% for the first quarter of 2000 exempted carriers from contributing to USF until they generated approximately $1.425 million in total service revenues. However, using the ’safe harbor’ allocation during the current quarter, the contribution factor of 14.4% requires contributions from carriers with as little as $590,000 in total service revenues. Similarly, the highest contribution factor to date (15.5%, during the first quarter of 2011) required carriers using the ’safe harbor’ allocation to contribute to USF with as little as $538,000 in total service revenues."

A handful of rural rate-of-return telco executives took aim at the USTelecom-led efforts to create cost models for Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms, an ex parte notice released Monday showed. USTelecom had brought in analyst CostQuest to create cost models as it continues to lead industry-wide talks on wholesale reform. CostQuest executives have been sitting in on ex parte meetings since at least May to discuss some of their findings (CD May 24 p14).

The FCC shouldn’t get bogged down in questions of how to classify text messaging for Universal Service Fund contributions or any other piecemeal approach to universal service contribution reform, USTelecom warned the commission in comments posted to docket 06-122 and released Tuesday. “Universal service contribution issues need to be addressed in a comprehensive proceeding, not through ad hoc proceedings, such as those for which the Commission requests comment here,” USTelecom executives David Cohen and Jonathan Banks wrote in their comments.

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DALLAS -- The prospect of wireless security regulation is “changing the basic incentives of many management structures,” said Sam Curry, RSA chief technology officer. RSA is the security division of storage hardware and data recovery firm EMC. But officials at the TIA convention said that may not be happening quickly enough as malware for Android operating systems, for example, proliferates with a compounded growth rate of 400 percent monthly. “Security is a dirty word at many companies,” Curry said. “The language of risk at the C-level and elsewhere is not always fully developed.” Chief financial officers see security as just a cost to be managed, said Phil Attfield, CEO of Sequitur Labs. He said they need to start seeing security as a “profit center."

Small carriers, wireline and wireless, opposed to reverse auctions as part of Universal Service Fund overhaul could be fighting a losing battle in an effort to reverse a move in that direction by the commission. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski appears to have at least three votes in favor of a controversial reverse auction plan, FCC and industry officials said.