The Regulatory Mix, TMI’s daily blog of regulatory activities, is a snapshot of PUC, FCC, legislative, and occasionally court, issues that our regulatory monitoring team uncovers each day. Depending on their significance, some items may be the subject of a TMI Regulatory Bulletin.
TELECOM
FCC
The FCC announced the final agenda for its October 17, 2014, open meeting. The agenda includes a Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to comprehensively reform interstate and intrastate inmate calling services (ICS) to ensure just, reasonable and fair rates and charges for consumers as well as providers. (This item was not included on the tentative agenda released in September. See the Regulatory Mix dated 9/30/14.) The FCC will also hear a presentation regarding an inquiry into a major 911 service outage that affected seven states in April 2014. The presentation will include findings from a report on the causes and effects of the outage as well as recommendations on actions the industry, the FCC, and state governments can take to strengthen the reliability and resiliency of 911 services as the nation transitions to Next Generation 911. Other items to be considered address the use of spectrum above 24 GHz for mobile wireless services; deployment of wireless infrastructure; and broadcaster-to-broadcaster interference.
New York
Verizon filed a Petition for partial rehearing or reconsideration of the PSC’s Order reducing intrastate originating access charges. See the Regulatory Mix dated 10/10/14. Verizon noted that Ordering Paragraph 2 states that LECs’ compliance tariffs “shall provide that, when the originating carrier owns the serving tandem switch, originating switched end office and transport rates are reduced to zero for all originating traffic within the tandem serving area.” Verizon said that there is no explanation of this statement in the PSC’s Order and that because it is so “inconsistent with Commission’s intent as explained in the remainder of the Order [it] was obviously included in error.” Verizon also said that the Order “includes one factual error – the statement on page 16 that Verizon’s intrastate access rates are already at interstate levels.” Verizon clarified that this is true for terminating switched access rates and switched access rates applicable to VoIP traffic, but it is not true for originating switched access rates. tw telecom of New York and Windstream Communications submitted a letter in support of the Verizon Petition and requested that the Verizon Petition be granted in its entirety.
