Speaking at Iowa Telecom Association’s Video Conference last week, Tom Wacker, Director of Government Affairs for NTCA, said the hot topics in Washington are the deficit, ethics and international issues. As a result, communications is not a top leadership priority. He spoke of a meeting NTCA had last week with House Speaker Pelosi, Congressman Rangel and other members of Congress, along with other communications heavyweights AT&T and Verizon among others. One take-away from that meeting is that Congress may set aside net neutrality concerns to move things forward on the deployment of broadband. Wacker suggested there is a need for a model of convergence from a regulatory basis that matches what is happening with technology.
He emphasized that telcos and other small cable operators face unique challenges in the current environment including:
- Automatic escalation clauses
- Tying arrangements (take one network, take them all)
- Predatory pricing (dropping prices only where there is competition)
- Exclusive contracts
- Transport discrimination (not allowing IPTV)
- Mandatory multicasting (carriage of all digital signals from a broadcaster)
His presentation provided a good review of retransmission consent, local franchising and the CableCard requirement. To this last point, he characterized CableCard as, “LNP [Local Number Portability] for set-tops.” Wacker warned small operators, whether they are operating Hybrid Fiber Coax or IPTV systems, to apply for individual waivers if they cannot meet the FCC requirements. Apparently, the CableCard requirement is not one of those cases when begging for forgiveness will work.
