FCC Special Access Call Continues to Draw Crowd

The Federal Communications Commission’s vote to suspend its deregulatory triggers for special access (broadband business service) prices continues to draw both fire and fans from industry.

"With this action, the FCC has done right by consumers, and it's taken a first step toward promoting competition in wired and wireless communications," said Public Knowledge senior staff attorney John Bergmayer. "While consumers don't pay high special access fees directly, they still bear their cost. When competitive carriers have to pay unreasonably high rates for connectivity they may have to pass the costs along to users, or slow down new deployment."

COMPTEL, whose independent telecom members have complained about price increases for access to major carriers' plant, were all for the moratorium, as well as for suspending the deregulation triggers before it has collected industry data on the competitiveness of the market, the latter which was roundly criticized by the major carriers, FCC and Hill Republicans and various industry groups.

Not so appreciative of that suspension was AT&T, among those whose petitions for deregulation are now in limbo. While the company said the mandatory data collection was necessary, to suspend the triggers before it determines the current state of competition for the services was putting the cart before the horse.

Walter McCormick Jr., president of USTelecom, which represents major telecom providers including AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink, shared those concerns. "We are disappointed that the Commission has chosen to take this action despite its recent repeated admissions that it does not have adequate information to evaluate the competitiveness of the high-capacity services marketplace." he said.

Ditto Verizon in its statement from Donna Epps, VP of federal regulator affairs. "While today's Order acknowledges that the current rules fail to capture the full extent of existing competition, the FCC, before taking any action, should have collected the data it repeatedly has said it needs to evaluate the marketplace. There are many providers - cable companies and CLECs - that compete vigorously with special access. Given this intense competition, any efforts to impose new pricing regulation are unjustified and will depress investment in these networks so critical to our economy."

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) released a statement saying, “The FCC has once again handed down a decision without providing sufficient evidence that action is needed. The decision violates good process and is difficult to square with Chairman Genachowski's previous statements about how this issue would be addressed. The FCC told the D.C. Circuit Court in an October 2011 filing that the commission lacked ‘an evidentiary record that is sufficient to evaluate current conditions in the special access market,’ in part because of ‘the failure of some parties to produce information clearly documenting their claims that special access rates are unreasonable.’ Further, the FCC Wireline Bureau Chief said in April that the FCC was still faced with ‘an incredible dearth of data.’”