Chances appear good lawmakers will approve comprehensive telecom...

Chances appear good lawmakers will approve comprehensive telecom legislation as early as the next Congress, said Rick Boucher, a former Democratic member of the House who once chaired the Communications Subcommittee, in an interview. Boucher is now head of Sidley Austin’s Government Strategies group. “When the new Congress starts in January of 2015 there will a two-year period of real ferment where bills will be introduced, legislative hearings will be held, markups will happen and legislation will move forward,” he said. “It’s hard to predict how long that’s going to take. Even in the best case we're talking about three years from now. But I think the odds are well more than 50 percent that at the end of this process and however many years it takes we're going to see a statutory reform.” Boucher noted that work on the 1996 Act really started in 1989 with proposed legislation modifying the Cable Act of 1984, which later became one of the four main elements of the ‘96 act. “You get a sense of the time frame,” he said. “I think it'll go faster this time and part of the reason is there’s a central motivating theme now and that is the old network is vanishing, the new network is arising and there must be a managed transition to get us from one point to the next,” he said. “Then within that theme go the other important issues, such as the need for regulatory parity among broadband providers, the need for revamped FCC regulatory structure to get away from silos and meet marketplace and technological realities, the need to make more spectrum available so that on the wireless where there is so much growth now the bandwidth will exist in order to meet consumer demand.” The legislation will also emphasize the need to promote “core consumer values” as the industry is transformed. “I think you'd get some pretty broad-based agreement that these are the important issues.” The IP transition is the biggest challenge facing industry through the rest of the decade, said Boucher, who represents carriers among his clients. “Most people have already made this transition,” he said. “It may surprise you to hear that only 5 percent of Americans today use the old circuit-switched telephone network as their exclusive means of communications.” The cost of maintaining the old network is “soaring,” he said. “It’s old. It’s outdated. Telecom equipment manufacturers typically are not manufacturing equipment for it. They're making routers for wireless networks. They're making packet-switched routers that fit into wired networks, but they're typically not making equipment anymore for the old circuit-switched network.” Between 2006 and 2011, the most recent period for which data are available, phone companies spent $154 billion maintaining the old network “and that is more money than they spent on developing modern new networks,” Boucher said. This mandatory investment has made wireline phone companies less competitive versus their cable competitors, he said. Boucher said any revamp of the regulatory structure at the FCC should focus on parity. “It’s clearly a remnant from an earlier era and it essentially regulates companies not based on the services they currently offer, but based on their historic heritage,” he said. “Cable companies are regulated one way, telephone companies are regulated another way, wireless carriers another way, and so forth. That is a structure that completely ignores technology and ignores modern marketplace realities.” Boucher said the FCC was on the right track in proposing IP transition pilot projects. The transition can’t be a “flash cut” and “has to be carefully planned and managed,” he said. “It begins with a time-tested process of having demonstration projects, trials in carefully selected markets.” Similar market tests worked very well prior to the DTV transition, he said. “My assumption is that there will be at least one urban trial, at least one rural trial, maybe more,” he said. “The goal is to make sure that we know what can go wrong and then remedies for those problems are put in place prior to the sunset of the circuit-switched network at the end of the decade.”