WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission last week said it was overhauling its universal-service program by proposing new rules to determine how much telecommunications carriers pay into the universal-service fund and largely adopting a proposal from the Rural Task Force to subsidize rural wireline carriers.
In the first action, the FCC proposed changing the way telecommunications carriers pay into the universal-service fund to make it more equitable for all carriers.
The FCC is seeking comment on the way carriers are assessed the amount they pay into the universal-service fund. Some of these changes could include changing the assessments carriers pay to one based on units or lines, changing the basis used to determine how much carriers pay from billed revenues to collected revenues and whether to assess universal-service contributions based on current or projected revenues.
The changes are necessary, the FCC said, due to changes in the marketplace, including the growth of wireless services. This growth could mean that wireless carriers are paying more than their fair share into the universal-service fund, the commission noted.
In its public meeting on Thursday, the FCC modified the high-cost universal-service fund for high-cost rural carriers. High-cost rural carriers serve customers in rural America not served by the four regional Bell operating companies.
The action increases the total cost of universal service over five years to more than $9 billion, said FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell.
The action is only an interim solution, stressed Powell.
“I believe it is important that we develop a permanent support mechanism, based on forward-looking costs or another appropriate measure of costs, by which we can ensure that the rural high-cost look fund grows no larger than is truly necessary to accomplish its purpose. … We must guard against allowing universal-service programs to grow too large, lest we collect so much from carriers that they are hindered in their ability to compete and bring consumers new and better products and services,” said Powell.
Also at the FCC meeting last week, the agency proposed new rules for spread-spectrum devices. The proposed rules would revise the FCC’s regulations for unlicensed spectrum to reduce the amount of spectrum that must be used for frequency-hopping spread spectrum systems operating in the 2.4 GHz band (2400-2483.5 MHz).
In addition, the FCC granted a blanket waiver to allow new digital technologies that meet the existing rules for direct sequence spread spectrum to obtain FCC certification while it is conducting the rule-making process.
Direct sequence spread spectrum is one of two spread spectrum technologies-the other is frequency hopping-that reduce the power density of the signal at any frequency over the transmitted bandwidth, thereby reducing the probability of causing interference to other signals occupying the band.
