Rural Telco Associations Take Action on Universal Service Caps

Four rural telco associations filed an application for review and petition for stay of new caps on Universal Service support.

The caps, adopted several weeks ago by the FCC’s wireline competition bureau, have come under fire because of their use of quantile regression analysis to impose limits on the funding that small rate-of-return carriers receive to help cover the cost of their local loop infrastructure in areas that are expensive to serve. The quantile regression formulas are “arbitrary, unpredictable, utilize faulty data and ultimately fail to accomplish what they were intended to do: encourage carrier efficiency and increase broadband deployment,” said Stuart Polikoff, vice president of regulatory policy and business development for the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies, in a press release. OPASTCO is one of the associations that filed the application and petition, along with the National Exchange Carrier Association, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the Western Telecommunications Alliance.