WASHIGNTON-Members of the Congressional Rural Caucus Tuesday put a marker down in favor of universal service, urging the House Commerce Committee leadership to include reform of the subsidy program in any telecom-act rewrite.
“The universal-service fund is vital. It is vital that this rewrite gets it right,” said Rep. John Peterson (R-Pa.), chairman of the Congressional Rural Caucus. “Would I leave it up to the Senate?-Hell no!”
Most of the indications coming from key House Commerce Committee lawmakers and staffers are that they are willing to let Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, take the lead on universal service.
“The House will probably come forward with simply Internet-Protocol reform. It is still uncertain whether we will address in any serious way universal service or intercarrier compensation. My personal view is that we should give the Federal Communications Commission clear guidelines, criteria and a hard deadline to address those issues,” Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) told the Progress & Freedom Foundation last week.
Pickering said he expects that draft telecom-reform legislation could be circulated before Congress leaves for its August recess.
In a letter sent to the House Commerce Committee leadership, 60 members of the 140-member Congressional Rural Caucus urged that rural America have a seat at any telecom-reform table.
“As your committee begins to draft legislation rewriting the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we need to ensure government policies protect the infrastructure that makes advanced services, including broadband, possible and available to everyone in the United States,” reads the letter. “Let’s make sure the commitment to universal access to communications services is protected during a rewrite so that all Americans can have access to advanced communications, such as digital subscriber lines, cable, wireless and satellite.”
The universal-service fund was created to allow rural Americans to have comparable services at comparable rates to those paid by people living in cities.
The universal-service system was set up in the 1930s to bring telecommunications services to high-cost areas by using long-distance revenues. The system was complicated when the Bell system broke up in the 1980s, but was codified into the Communications Act in 1996. Congress at that time made it possible for all telecom providers to receive funds if they served high-cost areas.
Now with many consumers using mobile phones and Internet telephony to make long-distance calls, less money is going into the system at the same time that additional providers-mostly wireless carriers that have taken the second-line business from wireline carriers-have begun taking money from the fund.
Both the FCC and Congress are looking at ways to reform the universal-service system.
