FCC Officials: Comcast VoIP Issues Should Be Considered With Existing Proceedings
April 14 Letter Notes Statutory Classification of IP Voice Services Remains an Open Question
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 4/20/2009 6:32:47 PM
Senior Federal Communications Commission officials, in a letter last week to Comcast, agreed with the cable operator that issues raised about its IP voice service -- in an inquiry initiated in the last days of the Kevin Martin regime -- should be considered as part of ongoing agency proceedings.
The FCC launched a probe on Sunday, Jan. 18, two days prior to Martin's resignation as chairman, asking Comcast to explain an "apparent discrepancy" between its disclosure that the updated network-management practices could affect VoIP services and a section of its site that says Comcast Digital Voice is unaffected.
That inquiry also demanded that Comcast "explain any reason the commission should not treat Comcast's VoIP offering as a telecommunications service" for regulatory purposes.
Comcast responded that its Internet bandwidth-management techniques have no bearing on its own voice service, because its Digital Voice service does not traverse the public Internet. The MSO also noted that the FCC has a separate proceeding on intercarrier compensation that is awaiting commission action.
"Those would be the appropriate proceedings, on issues of general applicability to providers of IP-enabled services, in which to address your closing questions, and it would be inappropriate and in excess of delegated authority for any bureau or office to decide the answers to those questions before the full commission has done so," Comcast wrote in its Jan. 30 response.
Julie Veach, acting chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau, and Michele Ellison, the FCC's active general counsel, followed up on the matter in a letter to Comcast dated April 14. A copy of the letter is available here.
"As you stated, certain of the topics addressed in the January 18 letter remain the subjects of pending proceedings at the commission," Veach and Ellison wrote in the letter. "The statutory classification of voice over Internet protocol services (VoIP), with limited exceptions, remains an open question, and the intercarrier compensation issues with regard to many kinds of VoIP likewise are under active consideration."
For example, the letter referenced the IP Enabled Services proceeding (Docket No. 04-36), which seeks comment on what regulatory scheme the FCC should apply to IP-enabled services.
Interim FCC Chairman Michael Copps appointed Veach to the position of acting chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau on April 2. Copps named Ellison acting general counsel Feb. 13.
Under Martin's tenure, Comcast was the target of a probe into its policy of inhibiting peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent.
With the FCC scrutiny and other negative publicity on the issue, Comcast migrated to a "protocol-agnostic" bandwidth-management approach across its entire footprint that curtails only those users who consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth within a 15-minute window.
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