WASHINGTON-Three independent wireless carriers told the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday that changes to the intercarrier-compensation regime should move toward a bill-and-keep regime where carriers would choose the best way to terminate a call and then bill their customers for it.
“Bill-and-keep reduces the opportunity for incumbent local exchange carriers to burden the development of competition by imposing costs on competitors and maximizes the incentives for all carriers to operate more efficiently and to minimize costs. Greater efficiency strengthens the viability of the universal-service program by eliminating costs that would otherwise be met through increases in universal-service contributions. Bill-and-keep also removes any incentive to choose customers selectively based on the overall direction of the customer’s traffic. Finally, bill-and-keep is administratively simple, eliminating the need for carriers to measure, record and bill for interconnected traffic or for the FCC to regulate intercarrier-compensation rates,” said T-Mobile USA Inc., Western Wireless Corp. and Dobson Cellular Systems Inc.
The companies said the four proposals on the table to reform intercarrier compensation “do not represent industry consensus and do not reflect independent wireless carrier concerns and issues.”
Rather than submit a full-fledged plan of their own, the companies submitted six principles they hope the FCC will consider as it decides how to reform the manner carriers pay each other to terminate traffic.
Intercarrier compensation comes in two forms: access charges for long-distance calls and reciprocal compensation for local calls. Rural LECs rely heavily on access charges as a major revenue source. The other major source of revenue for RLECs is universal service. The FCC is also considering changes to the universal-service system. It is unclear whether intercarrier compensation can be changed without changes to universal service and vice versa. Universal-service subsidies and access charges are under increasing pressure as telecom evolves from a circuit-switched wired world to one where calls are connected without wires and without switches, and the distinction between local and long distance is shrinking.
