CenturyLink Suggests Capping All ICS Rates 'at or Very Near' Interstate Levels
CenturyLink supports lowering calling costs for inmates and their families in a way that won’t reduce the availability of service, even though it doesn’t believe the FCC has legal authority over intrastate inmate calling service (ICS) rates, site commissions or ancillary fees. The commission "should adopt permanent unitary rate caps for ICS calls at or very near" the current interstate call levels, CenturyLink said in a filing posted Monday in docket 12-375. In 2013, the FCC issued an order setting hard caps of 21 cents per minute for interstate debit and prepaid calls and 25 cents/minute for interstate collect calls (along with "safe harbor” rates of 12 cents/minute for interstate debit and prepaid calls and 14 cents/minute for interstate collect calls). CenturyLink said the commission shouldn't adopt a tiered rate cap structure distinguishing between “jails” and “prisons,” as some have advocated.
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CenturyLink also said the FCC should “eliminate all but a very narrow class of ancillary fees and impose reasonable caps on those it allows,” and it should give correctional facilities “discretion to require commissions on ICS services,” but “within any rate caps it sets.” In addition, the telco said the commission should exclude “juvenile detention centers, secure mental health facilities and jails with less than 100 inmates from any rate caps” but subject them to the same ancillary fee restrictions. And it said the FCC should grandfather existing contracts or at least allow a full budget cycle as a transition period for new rules.
In other recent filings, a counsel representing a group of petitioners that has pushed for reducing ICS rates -- "Martha Wright, et al" -- submitted an analysis that provided “additional evidence" that ICS provider costs "are overstated.” The analysis proposed a base rate of 8 cents/minute "based on adjustments to average costs reported by providers."
Global Tel*Link said the record shows that five of the largest ICS providers have overall per-minute costs between 13.4 cents and 19.7 cents. It also said “any perceived variations in the cost data are easily explained by the way in which the FCC designed the data collection and the way in which ICS providers retain and report their data.” Pay-Tel Communications made a filing saying: “The number of LEC-billed collect calls has been diminishing and continues to diminish in the ICS industry and now represents a very tiny percentage of all calls, which supports Pay Tel’s position that the Commission need not adopt different ICS rate caps for collect versus prepaid/debit calls"; and ICS market activity supports the point “that larger ICS providers are abandoning small- and medium-sized jails.” The FCC could act on ICS rates this fall, parties following the proceeding have told us.