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
Joining a growing list of petitioners, Pay Tel Communications has now filed its own petition for partial stay of the FCC’s Inmate Calling Service (ICS) Order. (The Regulatory Mix, December 3, 2013, and November 22, 2013) Pay Tel asks the FCC to stay the Order’s cost-based rates requirements, safe harbors, and interstate rate caps only as they apply to jails. Pay Tel argues that although the FCC’s order was “well-intentioned” it imposes a “one-size-fits-all regulatory scheme” that will make it “legally and mathematically impossible for Pay Tel and other providers of ICS in jails to recover their aggregate, holding-company level costs.” Pay Tel notes that the targeted relief it requests would “leave in place important, long-needed reforms for all ICS consumers and would keep the focus on the interstate rate regulations and the prisons that have been the subject of the Wright Petitioners’ efforts for more than ten years.” Read the petition here
Alaska
The Regulatory Commission of Alaska announced that, based on NeuStar’s latest projections, the state’s 907 area code will not be exhausted until 2028. The Commission credited its 2010 decision to implement number pooling for the extension of the projected exhaust date. Before number pooling was implemented, NeuStar had projected the area code to exhaust in 2012.
New Mexico
The Hearing Examiner (in the Commission’s case considering the appropriate regulatory relief for CenturyLink) has rescheduled the prehearing conference from December 5, 2013, to December 17, 2013. The delay is intended to give CenturyLink time to file claimed Confidential Material that is part of its Direct Testimony. At the conference, parties must be prepared to set an entire procedural schedule for the case.
In August 2013, the Commission found that effective competition exists for CenturyLink’s packaged and bundled residential services in all but four wire centers but deferred the specific regulatory relief CenturyLink should be granted to a further proceeding. In September 2013, the Commission decided to use the proceeding previously established to consider the development of a new Alternative Form of Regulation (AFOR IV) as the vehicle for this determination. (Bulletin subscribers see TMI Bulletins dated September 9, 2013, and October 4, 2013.)
