WESTERN WORLD

It doesn't take long to notice the difference between the Western Telecommunications Alliance convention and the industry's better known trade shows. At the first day's plenary session (billed as a “Cowboy Welcome”), the entire audience stood for a hands-on-hearts recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a group prayer. One seminar panelist was introduced with the words, “Let's see watcha got.”

It's fitting because the needs of rural telcos are every bit as distinct as this trade show's twang.

While rural telcos face the same slings and arrows as the rest of the wireline world — wireless and voice-over-IP substitution, regulations written in sand, etc. — rural telcos aren't as well armed with legal protection, political power or even a sizable work force to defend against them. (Their resources are so limited, as one speaker put it to a room full of rural telco leaders, that “When the office needs sweeping, you pick up the broom.”) Their customers are the customers that practically nobody else wanted, yet ironically they're still threatened by growing competition from wireless and cable players.

Like the rest of the industry, rural telcos see before them the Damocles sword of an anticipated rewrite of the Telecom Act. Some of the regulatory changes being considered at the federal level are a potential redefinition of rural carriers for the purpose of high-cost aid (which could cut off aid to some carriers), a change in the way government decides how much universal service funds to give each carrier from a forward-looking economic cost model to one based on embedded costs (which could decrease the level of aid for some carriers), a method to determine how to apportion aid in areas where wireless carriers compete with wireline rivals (which could again reduce aid to some) and an expansion of law enforcement surveillance regulations to IP telephony (which could force carriers to shoulder the cost of that expansion).

When the 1996 Telecom Act was written, a so-called “farm team” of less than a dozen House members worked to protect rural carriers.

“That group kind of fizzled,” said one WTA lawyer at last week's show. “We're trying to re-engage them.”

And while rural telcos defended themselves on Capitol Hill in the late 1990s with a rural task force (RTF) that helped shape universal service policy, there is no RTF to fight for prairie-dwellers now; it disbanded in 2000.

“I'm scared that we don't have the RTF this time,” said Western Alliance vice chair and former RTF member Evelyn Jerden. “Our adversaries are very, very good.” Considering all that this group has to contend with over the next few years, those group prayers don't seem a bit out of place.