December 2002
AT&T Seeks to Avoid Access Charges for Phone-to-Phone IP Telephony
Last week, the FCC requested comments on AT&T's 37-page petition to exempt its phone-to-phone IP telephony services from access charges. In what is sure to be a contentious proceeding between IXCs, LECs, wireless and next-gen providers, CompTel has already asked the FCC for more time to file reply comments. As it stands now, the FCC is requiring comments by December 18, 2002, and replies by January 7, 2003. CompTel points out that due to the complex nature of the issues and the time to reply falling over the holidays, it's not the only one likely to need more time.
In its petition, AT&T states that it seeks relief to resolve controversies with LECs over the applicability of interstate access charges to AT&T services, and to provide guidance to states that follow the federal rule in assessing intrastate access charges. AT&T views its current voice-over-IP (VoIP) offering as "essential" to "future offerings of the integrated voice, data, and multimedia services that IP allows."
AT&T provides a detailed history of the non-regulation by the FCC of the Internet and communications services provided over it. It states that the FCC has not addressed the applicability of access charges to phone-to-phone IP telephony services since refusing to entertain a 1999 petition from US West on the matter. "By declining to require providers of phone-to-phone IP telephony services to order inflated access service, the Commission allowed them to use end user local services that are priced closer to their economic cost. This has been a uniform practice of the many firms that are providing nascent wholesale and retail phone-to-phone IP telephony services - which collectively represent a tiny fraction (1%-5%) of interexchange calling."
AT&T accuses certain incumbent LECs of: (1) refusing to properly provision local business lines to terminate phone-to-phone IP telephony services; (2) taking down local business lines that they discover are being used to terminate such calls, or (3) using Calling Party Number identifiers to assess access charges on phone-to-phone IP telephony calls that terminate over reciprocal compensation trunks.
Access charges represent a significant portion of revenue for many LECs, and a significant burden on IXCs and some larger wireless carriers. Moreover, IP telephony has finally begun getting "traction," and can be expected to grow more significantly as the telecommunications industry recovers. For these reasons, the AT&T petition is likely to generate a flurry of comments and replies from all segments of the industry. Stay tuned for more. It should be interesting to see what others have to say about it.
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