FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has issued a stern warning to telecom carriers that they have no right to block or degrade…phone calls. While the concept of blocking or degrading has been a flashpoint in the net neutrality debate, this go-around Martin is upset by the decisions of AT&T and Qwest to block the interconnection of phone calls over the PSTN, made through “free” Internet-based international calling outfits.
These outfits, many of which, such as FuturePhone, are now defunct, had set up a system that allowed folks to make international phone calls at rates more typical of domestic long distance calls. The calls were routed to local carriers in Iowa and then globally shipped out over the Internet from there.
But one big problem kicked in: the ugly, complex system of call termination fees that long distance providers pay local telcos when handing off phone calls. In the case of AT&T, the termination fees charged by one rural Iowa telco jumped from $2,000 per month to $2 million per month as a result of these free calling outfits. (Gigaom’s Paul Kapustka has been on this story from the get-go and has a great explanation here.) Some of the telcos have even hauled AT&T into court demanding payment.
To stop this scam-like activity, AT&T and Qwest started blocking the calls of FuturePhone and others. Martin, speaking to a group of “digerati” in Silicon Valley today, said that even if the fees are outrageous, the telcos have no right to block the calls. They don’t even have the right to slow down those calls.
“We actually contacted the companies that were listed in the press [reports] and said our rules prohibit you from blocking consumers’ access to any of the service providers,” Martin said. Martin said the informal communication to the big telcos who were blocking calls was that if they didn’t stop immediately, the commission would start a formal process for legal recourse within days, and “would end up taking action as we saw necessary.”
According to Martin, all the offending telcos responded and said they would stop blocking — sort of. “One had stopped blocking, but we heard complaints the next week that they were restricting access, sort of narrowing the pipe,” said Martin. “We called them back and said, no, no, you can’t artificially degrade [service] either.”
Martin invited the big telcos to take their beefs to Washington if they need some relief.
“If you have a dispute about the intercarrier compensation rules, you can file petitions, and come to the commission to get redress,” Martin said. “But you can’t just stop letting consumers make those calls.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 4:30 PM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
