A petition by Central Texas Telephone Cooperative for a temporary...

needs to deploy longer loops to reach individual consumers over the “vast distances” in its territory, NTCA said. The facts in Central Texas’s petition “provide more than good cause” for the grant of a waiver, and the petition “highlights several critical flaws in the current regression model” that necessitate general corrections to the model, NTCA said. The petition “demonstrates the oddity of a model that assumes that providers should realize lower costs in deploying telecommunications plant over greater distances -- the negative coefficient for road miles in the model is intuitively incorrect, highlighting an underlying flaw in the model that should be corrected through more robust and deliberate testing of independent variables,” NTCA said.