FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was right to highlight in a recent speech (CD Sept 5 p1) the harm of a lack of competition in the last mile, Comptel said in a letter to the agency calling for “expeditious” action on special access reform. “Unjust and unreasonable terms and conditions” imposed by incumbent LECs “effectively lock-up competitors, preclude them from using facilities/services of other carriers (to the extent such an alternative exists) and disincentivize them from building their own facilities,” said Comptel’s Sept. 10 ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 05-25 (http://bit.ly/1mpmVD7). It said the lock-up plans “have impeded competition in the multi-billion dollar special access market and undermined investment in broadband networks, contrary to the Chairman’s and Commission’s goals of increasing consumer choice."

Call completion record-keeping requirements associated with the rural call completion order the FCC approved in October (CD Oct 29 p2) haven’t taken effect, but major telcos said Friday they're planning to at least partially comply with the rules anyway. The record-keeping requirements mandate that telcos collect call completion data on calls destined to rural ILECs, report that data to the FCC every quarter and retain the data for six months. Those rules haven’t taken effect because the Office of Management and Budget’s review of the rules remains “underway,” said Claude Aiken, Wireline Bureau Competition Policy Division acting deputy chief, at an FCBA event. The FCC’s relationship with OMB on large-scale information collection policy has been “rocky lately” but the commission is hopeful it can work with OMB to make the call completion rules “sail through,” Aiken said. The FCC has received four requests for waivers and five petitions for reconsideration of the rules, he said. Representatives from AT&T and CenturyLink said the telcos intend to submit as much call completion data as possible, but both telcos are also seeking waivers on the record-keeping rules. AT&T would have trouble fully complying with the rules because it would “have to update some very old switches” that the telco no longer maintains because it’s phasing them out as part of its transition to an all-IP network, said Brian Benison, director-federal regulatory. AT&T filed a waiver request seeking to provide data only on a “statistically significant” portion of calls on which it does track call completion data, he said. CenturyLink is implementing the safe harbor policies included in the order, which will “significantly reduce our use of intermediate carriers,” said Jeb Benedict, vice president-federal regulatory affairs. CenturyLink is also seeking a waiver of the reporting rules so it won’t have to report data on calls that involve multifrequency signaling and LEC-to-LEC calls -- two types of calls it’s technically difficult to collect data on, he said.

Continuing to permit Internet service providers to charge interconnection fees to online content providers is likely to increase effective video service prices to consumers, said David Waterman, professor emeritus at Indiana University’s telecom department, at a Sept. 11 panel that wasn’t on the record, recounted an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1wHLZZC) posted in docket 14-28 Wednesday. But trying to regulate the payments under a commercially reasonable standard “would be difficult because the variations in these payments are primarily a result of bargaining between ISPs and content providers that have varying degrees of market power,” the filing said. Waterman spoke at the Regulating the Evolving Broadband Ecosystem conference at the FCC, co-hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Nebraska.

Communities with widely available gigabit access have a per-capita gross domestic product 1.1 percent higher than communities with little to no gigabit availability, said a study released Thursday by Fiber to the Home Council Americas. The study examined 55 communities in nine states, a news release said (http://bit.ly/1wI8FJk). The 14 communities with gigabit “enjoyed approximately $1.4 billion in additional GDP when gigabit broadband became widely available,” said Council President Heather Gold.

Current E-rate funding is “not sufficient” and the FCC should go beyond indexing program funding to inflation and make “sizeable additional investments in a program that has only grown in importance in the 18 years since it was established,” said Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Portland, Oregon, Mayor Charlie Hales in a letter to Chairman Tom Wheeler Monday. The letter was provided to us by Best Best attorney Gerry Lederer, who represents Boston and whose firm represents Los Angeles and Portland. Los Angeles also supports a “meaningful increase in overall funding” for the program, Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote in a separate letter to Wheeler and FCC commissioners provided by Lederer. All those mayors are Democrats, except Hales, whose office is nonpartisan. Members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors met in New York City Aug. 11 to form a Cities of Opportunities Task Force, with New York’s de Blasio named chairman and Boston’s Walsh, vice chairman, said the letter from Boston, New York and Portland mayors. The task force backed strategies to “achieve digital equity and avoid educational disparity,” including ensuring that broadband services are available to lower-income residents and startup businesses; backing federal programs that bolster technological innovation and provide tech job opportunities for low-income people and minorities, and dealing with inequality in school systems, the letter said. Education interests and libraries are urging more E-rate funding but are running into opposition from telcos (CD Sept 18 p11).

The FCC “overstepped its authority” and “implemented a rule inconsistent with existing law” when it doubled the record-retention requirement in a July E-rate order (CD July 14 p1), USTelecom said in a petition for reconsideration filed Thursday and made available to us. The rule will “adversely” affect the program, the filing said. The agency had no comment. Despite an agency assertion otherwise, the rule is not necessary to comply with the False Claims Act, USTelecom said. That law “is designed to ferret out fraudulent claims by government contractors, not to increase the recordkeeping expense of government contractors,” said USTelecom. The act has a 10-year statute of limitations, the association said, but “a statute of limitations period by which a claim must be brought and a recordkeeping period during which records must be maintained serve fundamentally different purposes -- purposes that the Order conflates.” The 10-year requirement exceeds the requirement in other federal programs, many of which require record retention of five years or less, USTelecom said. The costs of maintaining and storing records for 10 years “is significant and would “greatly outweigh any purported benefit from having available records during the entire time that a person could theoretically assert a False Claims Act claim,” said the association.

Rates for intrastate inmate calls should be capped (CD May 5 p8), Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) Executive Director Paul Wright told FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn aide Rebekah Goodheart and Wireline Bureau officials during a Sept. 12 conference call, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1mi58Od) posted Wednesday in docket 12-375. Commissions that inmate calling service providers pay to correctional facilities and ancillary charges levied on top of calling rates should be eliminated, Wright said, according to the filing. Also involved in the call were HRDC Associate Director Alex Friedmann; Lance Weber, general counsel; David Ganim, prison phone justice director; Carrie Wilkinson, Washington prison phone justice director; and Drinker Biddle’s Lee Petro, counsel for Martha Wright, the Washington, D.C., grandmother who asked the FCC to regulate high inmate calling service rates. The agency is considering limits on inmate call commissions and rates (CD July 10 p4) after adopting an order last year that responded a decade after the fact to Wright’s petition to cut rates.

The FCC should craft net neutrality rules that “encourage investment in abundant bandwidth,” but allowing paid prioritization could “create incentives for providers to maintain scarcity and congestion on their networks, in order to sell services,” Google executives told Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and aide David Goldman. Google Fiber’s deployment “suggests that it is both workable and economically desirable to manage a broadband network without prioritization and consistent with open Internet principles,” Google said at the meeting in Mountain View, California, where the company is based, recounted a filing posted Tuesday to docket 14-28 (http://bit.ly/1u1bHY4). Company attendees included Craig Barratt, senior vice president-access and energy. Communications Act Title II is a “flexible, light-touch approach for the preservation of open communications networks,” Free Press said in net neutrality reply comments (http://bit.ly/1ASdX2E). Common-carrier principles are “perfectly suited and absolutely necessary to maintaining nondiscrimination principles and nondiscriminatory outcomes” for all telecom services, “not just those delivered on copper telephone wires,” the group said. The FCC has “tremendous ability to tailor Title II,” and “extraordinary power to forbear not only from its own rules, but even from statutes and congressional acts themselves.” Section 706 “will not work for the protections contemplated,” Free Press said. Some want a Section 706 approach, as other replies to the net neutrality NPRM showed (CD Sept 17 p11).

An “unprecedented” detailed analysis of AT&T phone service in Illinois that the company shared with FCC Wireline Bureau officials Sept. 11 “supports AT&T’s assertion that there is no reason in law or policy for the FCC to continue its current overly-broad ETC [eligible telecom carrier] regime or its mandatory Lifeline requirements” for ILECs, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1qYj5kB) posted in docket 10-90 Tuesday. Mary Henze, AT&T assistant vice president-federal regulatory, was among those representing the company. The data showed that about 80 percent of households in census blocks that do not qualify for Connect America Fund support get wireline services from other providers, the filing said. The figure “is a clear indication that customers have many attractive options for obtaining voice service,” AT&T said. As part of CAF Phase II implementation, ETC rules should be changed so they apply only to carriers that willingly accept CAF support and only for the geographic areas where such support is provided, said AT&T. Existing price-cap ILEC ETC designations in areas where no CAF support is received should automatically sunset, and Lifeline participation should be de-linked from the high-cost ETC designation and be made voluntary for ILECs, AT&T said.

Special access market data (CD Aug 19 p2) are due at the FCC Dec. 15, the agency said in an order on reconsideration Monday (http://fcc.us/1BJ8KfX). The agency amended its 2012 data collection order to reflect changes ordered by the Office of Management and Budget. The data will let the agency “analyze competition in the market for a service that is key to broadband and competitive voice services: special access,” said Chairman Tom Wheeler in a statement (http://fcc.us/1uR1RVN). The effort was hailed by the NoChokePoints Coalition, made up of special access users, which has been pushing for the data collection. “We believe the data submitted in response to this order will show that this marketplace is indeed broken and in need of reform,” the coalition said in a statement.