Telecom customers would pay up to $30 per month as an access recovery charge under proposed rules in FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s pending Universal Service Fund order, telecom lobbyists told us Tuesday. They said the charge would be “a benchmark” and structured similarly to the price cap-carrier-backed ABC plan. The charge would not officially come with a subscriber line increase fee, but would also not be a separate line item on customers’ bills, the lobbyists said.

The FCC’s Universal Service Fund reform plan, of which many still await details, could hurt rural and tribal operators and investment in rural broadband, speakers said at a Broadband Breakfast Club panel Tuesday. Meanwhile, many broadband projects funded by the Rural Utilities Service are on track, said Undersecretary of Rural Development Dallas Tonsager.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed universal service order lacks a “clear vision or roadmap,” leaders of the largest rural telecom associations said in meetings with FCC staff last week. Leaders from OPASTCO, NTCA, the Western Telecom Alliance and the National Exchange Carrier Association, along with executives from rural telcos, said the proposed overhaul isn’t comprehensive enough. “Such ambiguity, together with the imposition of new near-term constraints and the overhang of additional constraints or reductions in support to be considered in a further notice of proposed rulemaking, would only chill investment by RLECs and deter lenders and outside investors by perpetuating regulatory uncertainty,” the rural leaders said, according to an ex parte notice posted on docket 10-90.

A recently enacted California statute authorizes the California Public Utilities Commission to require interconnected VoIP service providers to begin collecting USF fees. The new law defines “interconnected VoIP service” as having the same meaning as in federal law. Under the law the CPUC won’t have to declare that interconnected VoIP providers are telephone companies. The new law also establishes how VoIP providers can allocate revenue and determine the locale of users of nomadic VoIP services. The CPUC has a pending rulemaking (R. 11-01-008) in which it’s considering whether to impose surcharges on interconnected VoIP.

Congressional leaders have revived notions of raiding the Universal Service Fund to help close the nation’s budget deficit, telecom lobbyists told us Friday. The lobbyists were told that House GOP leaders are still weighing whether to use universal service cash to help balance the nation’s books once the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction completes its work.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed universal service order would raise speed standards to 6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up, prune the so-called “right of first refusal” for incumbents, cut down the $2.2 billion set-aside for price cap carriers and reduce the transition time for rate-of-return carriers from 10 years to five, telecom and FCC officials told us Wednesday.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is “not optimistic” Democratic senators will support Republicans’ Congressional Review Act effort to kill FCC net neutrality rules, the ranking member of the Communications Subcommittee said Wednesday. Until the election, DeMint hopes to “minimize the damage” of the Democratic-controlled Senate and executive branch, he said. In other speeches also at a Free State Foundation event, Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., also railed against regulation. Stearns supported the FCC effort to revamp the Universal Service Fund, but said Congress should take the next steps of revamping USF contribution rules and updating the 1996 Telecom Act.

Rural telecommunications companies contributed $14.5 billion to the economies of the states in which they operated in 2009, said a Hudson Institute study prepared for the Foundation for Rural Service (FRS). Of that amount, about $10.3 billion was through their own operations and $4.2 billion was through the follow-on impact , the study said. Rural carriers improve economic development in urban areas as well, it said. Some 34 percent of the $14.5 billion final economic demand generated by rural telecom companies accrues to rural areas; the other two-thirds redounds to the growth of urban areas, it said. The rural telecom sector supported 70,700 jobs in 2009, both through its own employment and the employment that its purchases of goods and services generated, the study said. The study argued that the level of economic activity and employment is consistent with the values of access to advanced telecom services, as supported by the Universal Service Fund. If USF support declined or disappeared, companies would raise prices paid by customers and rural users would pay more for telecom services, the study said. Companies would also cut investment, affecting network quality overtime, it said.

Cable and rural telecom industry executives headline at Wednesday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on revamping the Universal Service Fund. Testifying are: NCTA President Michael Powell, National Telecommunications Cooperative Association President Shirley Bloomfield, U.S. Cellular President Mary Dillon and Frontier Communications Chief Legal Officer Kathleen Abernathy, the committee said Tuesday. Washington state Utilities and Transportation Commissioner Philip Jones also plans to testify, the committee said. The hearing is 2:30 p.m. in Room 253, Russell Senate Office Building. Cable companies “strongly support” efforts to update USF and intercarrier compensation, Powell said in written testimony that circulated among lobbyists Tuesday. Powell urged tweaks to the ABC plan. VoIP and circuit-switched calls must be treated the same, Powell said. He criticized telcos for “refus[ing] to pay the appropriate intercarrier compensation on VoIP traffic” that cable exchanges with them. Powell also supported capping the USF high-cost fund at its current level, $4.5 billion. And USF distribution should be technology-neutral, he said. “The FCC should put in place support mechanisms that harness marketplace competition, like competitive bidding or reverse auctions, to award subsidies to the most efficient provider, regardless of what type of technology that provider uses,” Powell said. “At that point, legacy high-cost support should end.” Frontier’s Abernathy urged adoption of the original ABC plan. “It is a carefully negotiated proposal among the carriers with the most history and involvement in universal service and intercarrier compensation,” she said.

Cable lobbied the FCC last week on the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation, before Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated an order on the topics (CD Oct 7 p1), filings in docket 10-90 show (http://xrl.us/bmfj53). Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and American Cable Association executives had conversations with Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett and others in the bureau, an Office of General Counsel staffer and/or Zac Katz, aide to Genachowski who helped write the order. GCI and NCTA also wrote the agency about the ILEC-backed ABC plan. “Many incumbent providers are unwilling to interconnect and exchange traffic in IP format, yet also are unwilling to pay the applicable access charges when the traffic is exchanged in traditional Time Division Multiplex (TDM) format, with the cable operator bearing the additional cost of converting the TDM traffic to IP,” NCTA said (http://xrl.us/bmfj6u). “There is broad support for the end result proposed in the ABC Plan -- a unified termination rate of $0.0007 that applies to all traffic exchanged between telecommunications carriers in TDM format, without regard to the format in which it is originated or terminated.” The ACA asked that “any distribution of Connect America Fund” being set up to help pay for broadband be “consistent with the Commission’s objective to deploy broadband to unserved areas in a manner that is effective, efficient, and competitively neutral.” The group cited its “alternative” to the plan that was submitted to the agency with the NCTA (CD Oct 5 p13). Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable want USF reformed “in a manner that brings stability and predictability to ICC arrangements and eliminates on a going-forward basis wasteful ICC disputes between” ILECs and VoIP networks, the three companies said (http://xrl.us/bmfj64). They want “a seamless transition from the current system to a unified transport and termination rate for all voice traffic.” GCI, which seeks a plan for Alaska, where it’s the No. 1 cable operator, that may be different from the USF order for the continental U.S., said (http://xrl.us/bmfj7a) the ABC plan needs some changes “for the rules to achieve the objectives of unified and harmonized intercarrier compensation rates and reduced arbitrage.”