WASHINGTON-CTIA has asked the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider some of its guidelines for designating wireless carriers eligible to receive universal-service subsidies, saying they are “overly burdensome and illogical.”
“These requirements extend a historical bias in the FCC’s universal-service rules for wireline networks in spite of a marketplace that is increasingly served by highly efficient wireless carriers,” said CTIA. “Imposing requirements that discourage wireless eligible telecommunications carriers will not address the underlying inefficiencies with the current high-cost universal-service mechanisms, will distort the competitive marketplace, and in the end, will deny consumers located in high-cost rural areas the same high-quality, innovative services available to consumers in low-cost urban areas. To be effective, the ETC designation rules must be even handed. They must also be tailored to achieve defined policy goals.”
Specifically, CTIA said that requiring carriers to submit buildout plans for five years was unrealistic and said that having different outage reporting requirements than those already required was redundant and unnecessary.
The universal-service fund was created to allow rural Americans to have comparable services at comparable rates to those paid by people living in cities.
The universal-service system was set up in the 1930s to bring telecommunications services to high-cost areas by using long-distance revenues. The system was complicated when the Bell system broke up in the 1980s, but was codified into the Communications Act in 1996. Congress at that time made it possible for all telecom providers to receive funds if they served high-cost areas.
Now with many consumers using mobile phones and Internet telephony to make long-distance calls, less money is going into the system at the same time that additional providers-mostly wireless carriers that have taken the second-line business from wireline carriers-have begun taking money from the fund.
Both the FCC and Congress are looking at ways to reform the universal-service system.
Members of the Congressional Rural Caucus are expected Tuesday to lay out their plans for telecommunications reform. One of the expectations is that this group of 140 lawmakers will ask that the contribution base be expanded to include cable-modem and Voice over Internet Protocol users.
On another universal-service topic, the American Library Association said last week that the number of libraries offering wireless Internet access is increasing. Nearly 18 percent of public libraries have wireless Internet access, and 21 percent are planning to offer it in the next year. The ALA-commissioned study was performed by the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University. Libraries are able to offer free Internet access by tapping into the E-rate, a portion of the universal-service fund set aside for schools and libraries to connect to the Information Superhighway.
