AT&T Presses for Major Changes to FCC Mobility Fund Order

A draft order on a new mobility fund, circulated by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler for the Nov. 17 commissioners' meeting (see 1610270054), is raising some concerns in industry. AT&T complained about the approach in a Monday blog post. Other industry players are reporting on recent meetings with officials prior to an expected sunshine notice cutting off further lobbying. The agency approved a one-time mobility fund in 2011 and five years later is moving forward on Phase II, as Wheeler promised the Competitive Carriers Association in September (see 1609200058).

Many of the lessons learned in the Connect America Fund (CAF) proceeding appear to have been forgotten, wrote Joan Marsh, AT&T senior vice president-federal regulatory. “This is all the more regrettable as MFI [Mobility Fund I] continues to face significant implementation challenges, with substantial funds still undisbursed and compliance challenges mounting."

Among failings of the draft order is that its time frames are too compressed, requiring recipients to complete deployment to 75 percent road miles by the end of year three of a five-year term, Marsh said. “This compressed time frame does not accurately reflect the time needed to plan the network, acquire sites, or get permits and/or rights of way, not to mention the obstacles faced when deploying service in remote and potentially challenging rural areas.” The order also would wrongly focus on road miles rather than population covered, Marsh said. “POPs coverage is business as usual for wireless network builds and good data on POPs is readily available,” she said. “Road mile coverage is harder to analyze and data problems persist. And the current proposal appears to contemplate counting service and 4WD [four-wheel drive] dirt roads, which are extremely hard to both measure and cover.”

The biggest problem is that the order proposes the same compliance framework found in Mobility Fund I, Marsh warned. The initial fund “contained little guidance regarding compliance and recipients are currently struggling to meet compliance ‘interpretations’ now being imposed by the Universal Service Administrative Co. (USAC),” she said. “Carriers have deployed networks but are not receiving funding as differences on compliance are hashed out.”

The order would provide $470 million in annual support for five years for winning bidders in an FCC auction to preserve and extend 4G LTE, according to a fact sheet. The FCC said despite the first fund, 3 million people and 750,000 road miles still don’t have access to advanced wireless service or rely on subsidized service. The order also calls for the phaseout of legacy USF support for wireless, with the phaseout ending July 1, 2021. The order also calls for baseline data speeds of 10/1 Mbps at rates “reasonably comparable” to those in urban areas. Up to $50 million per year would be reserved to pay for projects in tribal areas, the agency said. The FCC declined to comment on the AT&T blog post.

CCA’s focus in meetings at the FCC was on tweaks to the draft order. The association representatives reported on meetings with aides to all five commissioners and Wireless Bureau staffers. “CCA commends the Commission for its proposal to reform the program that expands mobile broadband networks to portions of the country that are currently unserved, while ensuring that rural areas that are served in part because of current support are not stranded or do not experience services turned down,” said the last of two CCA filings in docket 10-208.

The group stressed the importance of an “equitable phase-down period for legacy support recipients” that will lose other funding as the Mobility Fund is launched. Also critical is that the commission put in place an improved process so companies can challenge inaccuracies in the data used to decide whether an area is eligible for coverage, CCA said. “It is imperative that the FCC distribute funds in accordance with data that portrays an accurate and consistent picture of carriers’ mobile broadband coverage in rural areas, measuring which areas are served and which are not,” the group said.

Verizon officials discussed potential problems with aides to Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O’Rielly. A requirement that Mobility Fund recipients cover 90 percent of road miles ”rather than the 75 percent of road miles standard adopted for Mobility Fund Phase I, could discourage bids or raise bid amounts,” Verizon wrote. “Similarly, a requirement that bidders deliver speeds of 10 megabits per second downstream and 1 megabit per second upstream in the challenging areas eligible for Mobility Fund support could discourage bids or raise bid amounts.”

Small carrier Smith Bagley, which serves tribal areas, urged the regulator to create a tribal lands plan, modeled on the FCC’s Alaska plan, to provide special funding to serve rural tribal lands in the Lower 48 states. “We reiterated to the Commission that in very remote high-cost areas, any bid in a Tribal Mobility Fund auction must necessarily be high, due primarily to the low population density and the extraordinary cost of access to fiber and other backhaul facilities,” Smith Bagley said in a filing.