ClearCaptions Raises Concerns About IP Captioned Telephone Services Rates

ClearCaptions raised concerns about the FCC's ratemaking for IP captioned telephone services, in a meeting with FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau and Office of Economics and Analytics staff, said an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 03-123. The company said it "has every economic incentive not to provide purpose-built customer premises equipment" because it "has to absorb the expense" of training and installing the equipment. ClearCaptions said it preferred providing IP CTS "through end of life" and with the use of communications assistants (CA) because "they perform better on some calls" than automatic speech recognition (ASR). The company also backed the use of a blended rate for IP CTS, saying it "makes continued provision of CA IP CTS possible because retaining customers, and the margin on ASR, offsets any loss on those calls that require CAs to maintain service quality."