One day before National Broadband Plan release: Six questions still unanswered

With Federal Communications Commission officials set to unveil details of the National Broadband Plan in a meeting tomorrow morning, the telecom industry is eager to learn answers to several questions that have not been addressed in information about the plan released to date.

1. Definition of broadband
The Commission already has outlined recommendations to reform the Universal Service program with the goal of making broadband available to 99% of Americans by 2020 without any new funding. But officials have not revealed what definition of broadband they want to use in setting that goal.

Although FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has said he’d like to see 100 million households with 100 MB/s connectivity, the Universal Service data rate goal doesn’t appear to be quite so high. In announcing plans to help cover the cost of bringing broadband to areas that are costly to serve, officials talked about using fixed broadband wireless or bringing fiber closer to the end user. They didn’t talk about bringing fiber all the way to the home, which is essentially what it would take to support 100 MB/s speeds.

2. How will we get to “100 squared?”
So if the 2020 deadline doesn’t apply to the “100 squared” initiative, when is the deadline for that initiative? Don’t expect to find it in the plan. But, as a recent Connected Planet reader poll noted, telecom industry stakeholders are interested in learning how the FCC plans to encourage telcos to boost speeds to that level. Even AT&T’s fiber-based U-verse offering appears incapable of achieving that data rate without infrastructure modifications.

3. POTS sunset for all telcos?
Another critical question that telecom stakeholders hope to see answered tomorrow is whether the FCC will call for the full-scale phaseout of traditional circuit-switched voice service in favor of broadband networks supporting VoIP. With a target of 99% broadband availability, this would appear to be a logical move—and as AT&T has pointed out, one that would help fund telco investment in broadband. The FCC already has said it wants to discontinue Universal Service support for voice-only networks by as early as 2017, but has stopped short of setting a sunset for all telcos, including those that do not receive Universal Service.

4. Access charge reform
One area that the FCC has offered only sketchy details about to date is access charge reform. Detractors say today’s charges are exorbitant and are not based on the actual costs of interconnecting calls. Rural telcos say they need access charges to help cover their network costs, which are higher than in metro areas. Some service providers have avoided paying access charges through various forms of arbitrage, including removing or replacing the phone numbers from which calls originated in the call record and terminating long-distance traffic over local trunks.

What FCC officials have said is that they want to put an end to per-minute access charges, beginning as early as 2012. But they have not said much about how carriers would compensate each other for using each other’s networks other than to suggest that carriers should develop their own methodology similar to what Internet-based providers have established with one another.

5. Interim access charge solutions
The biggest concern, however, may be the short-term, during which the plan will seek “interim solutions to address arbitrage,” according to Carol Mattey, senior policy advisor for the Omnibus Broadband Initiative. Although Mattey did not provide details, such solutions could include requiring tandem switch operators to police traffic passing through the switch or requiring VoIP providers to pay terminating access charges. Today many VoIP providers argue that they are not required to pay those charges because they are not communications service providers.

6. Broadband as a communications service
The classification of VoIP as a communications service could be a logical move if the National Broadband Plan tackles another issue that some observers expect it to—the classification of broadband as a communications, rather than information service. Some have argued that if the FCC does not make this move, it would not have the authority to transition Universal Service from a voice-based to broadband-based program. But if the FCC makes that move, it will be in for a big fight from those who believe it could lead to unmerited oversight of Internet content.