FCC Extends Separations Freeze Rules Up to 6 Years

The FCC extended for up to six years its freeze on federal-state jurisdictional separations of telecom costs and revenue for rate-of-return incumbent local exchange carriers (see 2407020017). Separations rules "play a substantially diminished role in allocating costs between the interstate and intrastate jurisdictions," the agency said in an order Thursday in docket 80-286. The FCC referred to the Federal-State Joint Board on Jurisdictional Separations the issue of whether to permanently freeze the rules and whether carriers still using separations should be allowed to unfreeze their category relationship every few years. The freeze expires Dec. 31, 2030, or after it receives a Joint Board recommendation.