Latest Special Access Draft Order Provides Data Request for FCC Staff to Implement
The FCC’s long-awaited special access order is more explicit than version first circulated by Chairman Julius Genachowski regarding which data the Wireline Bureau should request from the industry, agency and industry officials told us. The “must vote” date had been pushed back to Wednesday (CD Dec 3 p3). A vote hadn’t been finalized at our deadline, an agency official said. One factor is that Commissioner Robert McDowell is out of the country, an FCC official said. McDowell and Genachowski traveled this week to the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai. (See separate report in this issue below on WCIT.)
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Bureau authority over what to include in a special access data request is scaled back from the order Democratic commissioners voted to approve in October (CD Oct 26 p3), an FCC official said. The Republican commissioners wanted to see the actual request rather than delegating all authority to the bureau, the official said. The original draft order, which the three Democratic FCC members agreed to in October, would have given broad leeway to the bureau to make the specific request, agency officials have said. A bureau spokesman had no comment.
There are plans to include a potentially representative data request that could serve as a model of sorts for actual queries, which the bureau will then issue to special access market participants under authority delegated by the full commission, commission and industry officials said. One sticking point, an agency official said, has been how much authority to delegate to the bureau staff to make changes. One telco official said the attachment will “fall short of an actual request,” but it will provide “pretty significant guidance” to the staff on what the data request needs to look like. “They're trying to use the attachment to bind the staff’s hands,” the official said.
The collection of data on “best efforts” services has been another point of contention, FCC and industry officials have said (CD Nov 30 p6). Best efforts services are non-dedicated Internet access services that compete with the dedicated special access lines. Negotiations this week have focused how much information about best efforts services to actually request, industry and agency officials said. But an industry source told us the information sought on best efforts services is “very limited.”
Negotiations on the eighth floor have been fruitful, and are ongoing, agency officials said. Either McDowell or Commissioner Ajit Pai could have decided to dissent from any draft, but enough progress has been made to continue the negotiations, an agency official said: “Hope springs eternal."
A bureau official asked TDS Metrocom this week about the extent to which the telco relies on unbundled network elements (UNEs) to serve residential customers, as opposed to business customers, an ex parte filing said (http://xrl.us/bn4y6y). The official was seeking this information in the context of the upcoming special access data request, TDS said. The company responded that it has marketed UNE-based services to residential customers in the past, but doesn’t any longer.