A rousing and thoroughly disingenuous defence of telecommunications competition doesn’t appear to be enough for Comcast to get permission right now to cherry pick affluent households in Ponderosa Telephone Company’s territory. A pair of California Public Utilities Commission administrative law judges (ALJs) said in a ruling last Friday that even though allowing competitive telecoms companies into the protected service areas of California’s small, rural telcos should be considered on a case by case basis, those decisions should be made within a common framework.
The two ALJs – Mary McKenzie and Hazlyn Fortune – are managing what the CPUC calls a rulemaking proceeding that’s looking at the way California subsidises, and consequently protects, small telephone companies that serve remote and sparse rural communities that aren’t lucrative enough to attract big telecoms service providers. Or at least used to be. As California’s suburbs spread further out from cities, new developments are springing up on farm and ranch land that’s served by rural telcos.
Citing Comcast’s case as an example, they decided that the next step in that process is to establish a general set of rules that will guide future decisions about who should provide telephone service and, in some cases, broadband service in those new communities…
The Commission will first consider adopting general criteria in this Rulemaking as a framework for allowing competition, which will then be evaluated on a case-by-case basis considering local conditions for each individual small [rural telco] service territory where an application is filed by a potential competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) seeking a certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN).
Comcast’s request to be allowed to provide telephone service in the upscale Tesoro Viejo development north of Fresno is being handled by another ALJ, Zhen Zhang, in a separate case. In theory, Zhang doesn’t have to wait for McKenzie and Fortune to finish their work, which could take months. In practice, since ALJ’s produce draft decisions for consideration by CPUC commissioners, it would probably be a waste of time to, as Ponderosa described it, put “the cart before the horse”.