Regulatory Watch : Carriers Continue Negotiations with CLECs

Carriers Continue Negotiations with CLECs

Heeding FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s call for ILECs and CLECs to sit down and negotiate unbundling agreements, the nation’s CLECs are doing just that. Powell asked for the “good-faith” negotiations shortly after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals knocked down the commission’s Triennial Review Order, which gave states the role of determining, on a granular basis, where CLECs could lease unbundled network elements and where they’d be forced to buy their own switches and other network elements.

The FCC promised in a letter to the competitive industry that it would ask the Circuit Court for another 45 days beyond the 60-day stay the court issued at its decision. The FCC also promised to ask the U.S. Solicitor General to seek a comparable extension of the deadline for filing a petition on the court’s decision with the Supreme Court, so parties could have time to negotiate new agreements.

Though the CLECs have agreed to negotiate with ILECs, it’s not with complete trust, according to CompTel/

Ascent CEO H. Russell Frisby Jr.

Competitors have said they’ve tried to negotiate with RBOCs and LECs in past years but were rewarded with unacceptable prices and non-competitive proposals.

“We [CompTel/Ascent members] are poised to enter these commercial negotiations in good faith, with the expectation of finding a mutually beneficial solution to the current issues in contention,” Frisby responded. “Our hope is that the Bells come to the table with the same intentions and do not use this as a forum to exploit their exclusive control over critical portions of the public switched telecom network [PSTN].”

ALTS, another of the big competitive industry groups, joined CompTel/Ascent in publishing a framework for negotiations it hopes will create an air of fair negotiation and complementary results. “We believe that the sizeable challenge of negotiating hundreds of agreements in such a short period of time will be eased” by the framework, the groups said.

The framework includes provisions that would make negotiations transparent and reportable to government regulatory officials. Here are a few highlights:

• That the negotiations follow the spirit and laws in the Telecom Act of 1996, especially sections 251 and 271, which respectively describe the UNE-P regime and the ability of RBOCs to enter long distance markets after proving they’ve provided CLECs with an automated OSS capability.

• Maintain the agreements already in place before the negotiations began. That is, ILECs can’t wipe the table clean and hold competitors without service until negotiations are complete.

• Negotiations have to be transparent; that is, progress during the talks has to be reported to government officials to keep them fair and consistent with antitrust laws.

• Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) made during the negotiations should not prevent parties from sharing relevant information with federal or state officials or regulators—provided that such information may not be admitted or used in subsequent proceedings or litigation.

AT&T To Get VoIP Access Ruling

At long last it seems AT&T’s petition that phone calls that hit the Internet be free of access charges will be answered, but not the way it wants. The FCC is set to rule against AT&T, which means other carriers can collect on hundreds of millions of dollars AT&T owes them for terminating VoIP calls on their networks. The carrier has withheld payment to some carriers for at least two years.

AT&T filed the petition several years ago, and the FCC’s slowness in response had raised the ire of former House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La., who told the commission in a letter that “silence is not acceptable” in AT&T’s request for a ruling.

If the FCC does rule against AT&T, it comes as a surprise to some, who felt the FCC’s recent ruling that Pulver.com—a phone service that relies on end-to-end VoIP infrastructure and does not hit the PSTN—is exempt from access charges. The FCC also stated in its launch of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on VoIP that it wanted as little regulatory hassle on future IP services as possible.

Qwest Could Get Record Fine

Qwest could end up paying $9 million for not filing interconnection agreements with utility commissions in the region it serves, the FCC says.

According to the complaint, the RBOC failed to file 46 interconnection agreements with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the Arizona Corporation Commission as required by the Telecom Act of ‘96. Interconnection agreements are filed with state PUCs so the regulatory bodies can approve them.

“This action sends a clear message, along with the complementary state actions, that violations of the key pro-competitive provisions of the Act will not be tolerated,” the FCC’s Powell said after the proposed fine was announced.