Jeff Leslie of ITS Fiber and ITS Telecom, a last-mile provider of broadband and data center services in south central Florida, explains the importance of the just enacted modification to NECA Tariff #5 that will allow rural carriers to competitively price symmetric services on their fiber to the home networks. ITS Telecom is an incumbent LEC that serves homes and businesses in the small inland town of Indiantown, Florida and its surrounding rural areas. ITS Fiber is a sister company to ITS Telecom and is a CLEC that, through a unique fiber swap deal with the county government, serves a market with the potential for over 200,000 connections.

In this interview, Leslie explains that existing NECA tariffs prevent ITS Telecom from fully meeting market demands. He points out the growing importance of symmetric services. Delivering symmetric bandwidth differentiates a Fiber to the Home network from legacy offerings and, to date, rural FTTH providers and their customers haven’t been able to realize the full benefit of this feature.

Leslie, who is a member of the NECA Rate Development Task Force, suggests that the FCC’s August approval of the modification of NECA Tariff # 5 (this tariff was pending when the above video was filmed), will give rural carriers pricing and packaging flexibility to differentiate their fiber to the home offerings.

This 100+ page NECA document explains the details of the changes to NECA’s tariff. Around page 88 of this PDF, the text explains some of the key additions and changes, including the provisions of new Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) Voice-Data and Data-Only speed options (10/10 Mbps and 100/100 Mbps), new Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) Data-Only speed options (25/50 Mbps and 50/100 Mbps) and a new Two-Way Ethernet Transport Service (ETS) Multi-Media Virtual Circuit Channel (MM-VCC) option available only for use with A/SDSL Access Services with upstream and downstream transmission capabilities of 10 Mbps or greater. As stated in the NECA document:

“The new SDSL speed options and Two-Way ETS MM-VCC option are being introduced to allow member companies who have deployed advanced broadband networks to offer their network and anchor customers higher speed broadband transmission services. The existing ADSL Data-Only speed options are being introduced to allow customers who subscribe to an ADSL Voice-Data option to keep the data portion of the service if they cancel their voice service.”

In a nutshell, these new changes, along with some of the other modifications to Tariff #5, should allow operators to give their customers more for the same price (e.g. more bandwidth, more options, etc.). It will be interesting to see how these changes will help innovative operators, such as ITS Fiber, price and create services that leverage their in-territory bandwidth advantage to better help their customers.

[10/6/14 Update: Because of the aforementioned changes, ITS Fiber launched symmetric gigabit services, ITS Fiber Zymmetric, at the beginning of October.]

[Special Thanks to Donna Marreel of ITS Telecom for her guidance and review of the above. As she points out, ADSL Data only option has always been available to our customers but the cost is quite high and is not competitive with the larger companies who offer Data Only under their own tariffs.]