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 Briefing.
TELECOM
FCC
CenturyLink Restructuring
The FCC granted CenturyLink’s request for waiver of various FCC rules to facilitate a pro forma internal restructuring plan. Under this plan it will merge all or some of its ILECs in states in which it has multiple ILECs in order to reduce the number of study areas in a state. The waiver permits CenturyLink to consolidate its ILECs and allow its switched access rates and eligible recovery to be consolidated and calculated on the basis of the surviving study area in a state. (Eligible recovery is the amount of intercarrier compensation revenue reductions that ILECs are eligible to recover through a combination of an end-user charge Access Recovery Charge (ARC) and, where eligible and if a carrier elects to receive it, intercarrier compensation replacement Connect America Fund support.) As part of this restructuring, the CenturyLink ILECs in each surviving study area will first operate under a single tariff with uniform switched access rates, participate in a single statewide federal access tariff filing, and consolidate their Eligible Recovery before merging. Switched access rates will be consolidated using a revenue-neutral, weighted approach.
TTY Waiver
The FCC granted participating members of the Competitive Carriers Association a temporary, limited waiver of requirements to support text telephony (TTY) technology on wireless Internet Protocol (IP) network facilities. CCA members that seek the benefit of the waiver granted by the Order must identify themselves to the FCC no later than July 19, 2016, and affirm that, as CCA has represented, they are aware of the commitments stated in CCA’s revised petition. CCA members that do not “opt in” to receive protection under this waiver order by that date must submit a separate waiver request, with an appropriate showing of justification, in order to obtain a waiver of the TTY support rules. The waiver is subject to several requirements including customer notice and ongoing reporting. The waiver expires the sooner of December 31, 2017, or the effective date of rules providing for alternative IP-based accessibility solutions.