WASHINGTON-Both state and federal regulators received lots of advice last week on whether wireless carriers should be granted eligible telecommunications carrier status, a necessity if they want to receive universal-service support.
Small rural telcos fear that subsidies they have come to rely on will go elsewhere if wireless is granted ETC status.
“Thinking about the rural area that my company serves … the market recognizes that the duplication of things does not make any sense … If there is only one grocery store in town and the market says that is all there is going to be, should there be more than one ETC to share in the revenue that is needed to provide the service that is there?” asked Earl Owens, president of the National Telephone Cooperative Association and manager of the Blackfoot Cooperative.
Owens addressed the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners meeting here last week.
After addressing NARUC staff on Mar. 5, representatives of the Competitive Universal Service Coalition sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging action on six petitions which ask the agency to grant ETC status to wireless carriers regardless of whether or not the states agree-and in most cases they have not agreed.
“CUSC calls upon the [FCC] to clarify the procedures for ETC designation, the substantive standards that should be applied, and specific matters regarding additional carriers in rural telephone company areas,” said CUSC in a letter to the FCC on Wednesday.
The FCC is expected to act on the ETC petitions sometime this spring, said Thomas Sugrue, chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, at the recent CTIA Wireless 2000 show.
The quest for ETC status has been long and hard with ETC designation proving to be elusive to some wireless carriers-most notably Western Wireless Corp.-who have sought the designation.
On a related front, regulators are focusing on a recently amended proposal to make explicit the way the universal-service fund is financed and to reduce access charges. The proposal and its amendment were submitted by the Coalition for Affordable Local and Long-distance Service or CALLS.
The proposal, which the FCC will be accepting comments on until March 30 (replies are due April 13), received harsh criticism from state regulators, competitive local exchange carriers and the wireless industry. All said they had not been included in the negotiations on either the original CALLS proposal or CALLS2 as it has become known.
“I am concerned that the CALLS proposal may be gathering momentum yet the competitive wireless industry is still missing from the equation,” said Angela Giancarlo, director of federal regulatory affairs for the Personal Communications Industry Association.
The amendments do not change the universal-service portion but rather tinker with the access-fee portion. Access fees are the funds long-distance companies pay to local exchange carriers to connect their calls.
