State Regulatory Oversight over Service Quality Urged
There’s need for state control over quality of retail and wholesale service regardless of technology platform, even though in some states incumbents have said the increased availability and types of service have made oversight unnecessary, state officials said during a conference call held by the National Regulatory Research Institute.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
States are best positioned to understand quality issues because they're closest to the problem, said Don Jackson, regulatory manager with rural telecom provider TCT. There’s need for better consumer protection, said Wayne Jortner, senior counsel with the Maine Public Advocate, citing FairPoint’s service issues. Sometimes competition isn’t about service quality, he said. Competition is meaningless without transparency, said Robert Haga, a senior adviser with the California Public Utilities Commission. California adopted new service quality metrics in 2009, he said, but setting high standards doesn’t mean they're hard to achieve. The new rules still need to be evaluated to make sure they're reasonable and effective, he said. Improving response time to consumer complaints is one thing the commission has been looking at, he said. But states need to look at quality issues on an individual basis because many factors such as the nature of the service area, business model and federal subsidy could all play a part, Jackson said.
Speakers acknowledged that some states have started or passed deregulation of retail basic voice services. Deregulation of voice worried regulators in Massachusetts, said Geoffrey Why, commissioner with the state’s Department of Telecom and Cable. The department’s investigation indicated state regulators still need to be very actively involved in voice, he said, citing a settlement with Verizon over service issues in western Massachusetts (CD June 23/10). Wholesale service quality also needs to be “rigorously enforced,” Jortner said. Jackson agreed, saying state regulators need to ensure network functions regardless of sales models. Just because some states have deregulated retail voice service doesn’t mean baseline consumer protection would disappear, said Haga. One way to ensure service quality, as suggested by a research paper by Peter Bluhm, NRRI principal, is through eligible telecommunications carrier (ETC) designation, Jortner said. Bluhm’s paper claimed a state that has authority to hear ETC designation cases may condition those designations on compliance with state service quality standards. But not every carrier is an ETC, Jortner said.
Meanwhile, new measurement standards are needed for new services like VoIP, Jackson said. It’s the service quality, not where the call comes from, that matters to consumers, he said, saying standards need to tailor to individual technologies. There’s lack of effort to measure broadband network performance, Jackson said. Haga noted the FCC’s Technology Advisory Committee advocated development of new metrics to measure broadband network quality (CD April 26 p2).