Comptel Changes Name to Incompas, Members Keep Up Special-Access Drumbeat

SAN FRANCISCO -- Comptel renamed itself Incompas Monday, as it seeks to expand its reach and membership across communications sectors. Promoting competition remains its top focus, said CEO Chip Pickering at the group's Comptel Plus conference (which kept its name for this year). FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said there that advancing competition is central to the agency's mission and she repeated support for Internet openness and USF Lifeline and E-rate broadband moves. Pickering and Incompas members urged the commission to complete its special-access review and address Bell business service rates and practices the competitors believe are anticompetitive.

Comptel traditionally represented local and long-distance wireline upstarts. Pickering noted that it now includes tech heavyweights Amazon, Google, Netflix and Twitter, wireless carriers T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular, and international giants BT, SoftBank and Vodafone. “This is a big day,” he said, announcing the rebranding as Incompas: The Future of Competition. The group is increasingly looking to encourage innovation, investment and the Internet while providing direction, but spurring competition remains its “core value”; hence the name Incompas.

Interviewed by Pickering, Rosenworcel said she generally started with the law in approaching regulatory issues, and the “clear focus” of the 1996 Telecom Act was to foster competition. The communications industry and market has changed a lot since 1996, but she agreed competition was a core value and also an economic imperative. “It should always be at the center of what the FCC does,” she said.

Rosenworcel noted that the FCC had extended school and library E-rate discounts to broadband, increased annual funding to $3.9 billion and generally required competitive bidding on contracts. She also pledged to use Lifeline support for low-income consumers to narrow the “homework gap” affecting students lacking Internet access at home, much less broadband. She said broadband-enabled telemedicine held enormous potential to improve public health and reduce hospitalization and travel time and costs. And she said openness is the foundation of an Internet economy that “is the envy of the world” and makes U.S. companies “fiercely competitive and creative.” FCC net neutrality rules support such innovation and are worth the litigation battle, she said.

Pickering lauded the FCC for promoting a new wave of competition that is “going into all sectors, all markets" (similar to previous comments -- see 1509080048). He commended FCC actions on net neutrality, the IP technology transition, the incentive auction and to thwart the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. XO Communications CEO Phil Ancell said he is excited and a “little surprised” by how FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler fulfilled competitive commitments made at last year's Comptel show. “They have come to pass,” Ancell said.

Pickering and CEOs took aim at special-access rates and practices, which have been the subject of a protracted FCC review. The commission has collected industry data on the business market, and most recently the Wireline Bureau opened an investigation into Bell/ILEC volume and term conditions that rivals say thwart competitive responses (see 1510160060). Ancell said he is hopeful the commission will follow through and “finish the work” on special access. “Lock-up” provisions were limiting service, he said: “Something has to be done; it's noncompetitive.” TNCI CEO Laura Thomas said she is “comfortable that the data are going to show the large incumbents still have a large presence” in the special-access market. She also said her company is locked into seven-year commitments focused on traditional circuit-switched traffic that prevented it from switching to more-robust IP systems.

EdgeConneX CEO Randy Brouckman said industry needed more regulatory certainty than the FCC can deliver. He said that even when it adopts an order, carriers struggle to make plans and investment because the rules can be tied up in litigation for years. He said it's time for Congress “to reset” policy. Brouckman said Internet growth is exploding with video traffic. “You have to think in exponential terms,” he said. Pickering said policymakers need to return to a basic bipartisan consensus that started with the Department of Justice under Ronald Reagan moving to break up the old AT&T monopoly in 1984 and continued through the 1996 Telecom Act and its implementation.

In its Friday order opening an investigation into Bell special-access terms and conditions, the Wireline Bureau made a “very strong case” that the “incumbents will have to respond to,” both with information and with arguments to counter the allegations, Incompas General Counsel Angie Kronenberg told us between sessions.