SBC, Verizon pay $5.3 million in fines

SBC Communications and Verizon Communications paid $3.8 million and $1.5 million respectively to the federal government this month for failure to hit performance benchmarks required by the terms of last year’s Ameritech (SBC) and Bell Atlantic/GTE (Verizon) mergers.

However, both companies said they are encouraged by improvements that have been made in providing competitors with access to their networks.

“The payments that we have been making on a monthly basis have been cut in half in the last six months, so we’re making significant progress,” said an SBC spokesman. “The way the plan is set up, you have to perform at a near-perfection level in order to not make a payment.”

According to a Verizon spokesman, the RBOC’s potential payment could have exceeded $20 million, so the company is quite pleased to pay $1.5 million. He said this payment is the first since the Bell Atlantic/GTE mergers and compares favorably to SBC’s first payment, which totaled more than $6 million.

“We felt like this was an ‘A-plus on the grade card’ kind of performance,” he said.

Neither company believes it will ever get to the point where it makes no payments to the government, because of the millions of performance metrics that have to be met each month.

“There are so many metrics, so many opportunities to incur an incident that it will be very difficult--and probably impossible--to achieve perfection,” the Verizon spokesman said.