VERIZON PROPOSES VoIP PAYMENT PLAN

Verizon Communications outlined last week an intercarrier compensation plan that would exempt voice-over-IP providers from access charges but allow incumbents to continue collecting billions of dollars in access fees from IXCs.

The proposal would impose access charges each time a call touches the public network. The origination or termination of calls to VoIP phones would not be subject to fees. IP-to-IP calls would have no access charges, public network-to-public network calls would have access charges on each end, and only the public network side of an IP-to-public network call would be subject to fees, said Tom Tauke, Verizon's senior VP of public policy and external affairs.

The VoIP proposal is a corollary to Tauke's “old lines, old rules; new lines, new rules” philosophy that has become a fundamental principle of FCC policy. It also encompasses the RBOC's belief that VoIP should be free from regulation, said Link Howing, Verizon's assistant vice president for Internet and technology policy.

However, Verizon does not believe long-distance carriers that use IP networks to transport traffic from one public network phone to another should qualify as VoIP providers, Howing said. The approach, supported by all RBOCs, would preserve the $16 billion in annual access fees paid by long-distance carriers to ILECs.

AT&T, which pays more than half of those fees, believes the Tauke proposal would discourage network upgrades by ILECs because they would not want to lose access fees associated with legacy networks, an AT&T spokeswoman said. In addition, such a structure would be unfair because AT&T's access charge liability would be out of its control, she said.

Robert Quinn, AT&T's vice president of federal regulatory affairs, agreed. “The Tauke tautology: If AT&T carries its long-distance traffic on its old TDM wires, we pay access charges,” Quinn said in a statement. “And, if AT&T spends billions of dollars to upgrade our network to carry voice traffic on our Internet backbone, we still pay access charges. This is the same droning Bell mantra — we don't care if it's new packets, that traffic is still subject to [the Bells'] old rackets.”

But the RBOC viewpoint appears to be gathering momentum at the FCC, with Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy expressing a similar position last week during a speech delivered at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

“When I talk about creating a new regulatory framework for VoIP, I have in mind services that use Internet protocol over the last mile, at least on one end of the call,” Abernathy said. “By contrast, a call that starts on the PSTN and ends on the PSTN does not necessarily warrant different regulatory treatment from other circuit-switched calls simply because a long-distance carrier chooses to use IP technology at some midpoint in the network.”