FCC To Telcos: No Blocking Iowa Calls → Re: We're still waiting......

The delicious irony of this is that the ILECs paid millions in lobbying money to get these termination fees so that they could gouge smaller companies.

Now it's biting them in the ass, just like it did when dialup got big.

The rural ILECs get a much bigger termination fee then Verizon-NJ. If all fees were equal the leaches would not be in Iowa.

Two minor points--First, these are "access fees", charged to LD providers. "Termination fees" are what local ILECs and CLECs pay each other for passing traffic. (They have similar characteristics but are treated differently in regulatory structure. There is also a reasonable argument that these fees should not exist as the individual costs of both originating traffic from and terminating traffic to an end user should be paid by that end user.)

Second, it's "leeches", not "leaches".

calvoiper

Huh?

The fees were set up in order to subsidize rural service, because it costs more to serve a rural customer in a low-density area than one in a high density area. They've always been higher payments for the smaller companies in rural areas than for the big companies. They've always been so that the smaller companies could "gouge" the bigger ones, not the other way around.

Your comment makes no sense. There is no "delicious irony." There's simply that some of the rural companies hit on the idea that, thanks to conference calling and VoIP over a fiber network, they could provide services to lots of people located outside of their rural area while still getting these large fees.

It's a difficult problem, but so far the FCC seems to be getting it right. Allowing the big companies to block the network is clearly wrong, but at the same time these fees should be reexamined if the rural providers are able to use them in totally unintended manners that have nothing to do with bringing phone service to rural and poorer areas.

There is in fact delicious irony here because SBC and VZ, and their component predecessors, all lobbied hard for high and unrestricted access charges when they were just ILECs sticking it to the LD carriers.

Now, having used those high access charges to weaken ATT and MCI to the point where they could purchase them, SBC (under its acquired ATT name) and VZ ARE the LD carriers, and somebody else is sticking it to them. That is the irony of which sporkme speaks....