WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission should raise the wireless safe harbor for universal-service contributions from 15 percent to 40 percent, said the Coalition for Sustainable Universal Service.
Long-distance carriers make universal-service fund payments based on a portion of their revenues since universal service is funded with interstate revenues. Recognizing that it was often difficult for a wireless carrier to distinguish between interstate and intrastate revenues-especially for consumers on bucket plans-the commission allowed a carrier to choose either to pay based on its interstate revenues or 15 percent of its total revenues. This became known as the safe harbor.
The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association has acknowledged that the safe harbor should be raised. “CTIA believes that the existing USF revenue-based assessment system should be maintained. And, while we support raising the safe harbor percentage, we have not suggested a specific percentage to the commission,” said CTIA spokesman Travis Larson.
“CoSUS proposes that the [FCC] increase the wireless safe harbor to 40 percent of a carrier’s total end-user telecommunications revenues in order to address the current disparity between the contribution burden imposed on long-distance providers and that imposed on wireless carriers offering competing long-distance services. … Unless the commission sets the new `interim’ wireless safe harbor at a high enough level, the safe harbor will be a cap on wireless contributions instead of a safe harbor. Allowing the wireless safe harbor to act as a cap-as it does today-simply turns the safe harbor into a discriminatory mechanism to favor one set of interstate carriers over another. The law does not permit such a result,” said John Nakahata, CoSUS counsel.
CoSUS had been pushing to change the universal-service contribution system, saying that it levies an undue hardship on long-distance carriers-of which one marquee member is WorldCom Inc. That effort has been put on hold at the FCC recently while the agency looks for an interim solution to the funding woes of the universal service fund. That did not stop Nakahata from urging again for a connection-based system.
“The record evidence in this proceeding demonstrates overwhelmingly that the current revenues-based universal-service fund contribution mechanism is broken, cannot be fixed, and should be replaced with a connection-based contribution mechanism,” said Nakahata.
