Earlier this month the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upheld FCC orders that still require large telcos to be the carrier-of-last-resort provider of telephone service for at least some of their service territory. The ruling is the result of appeals made by CenturyLink and AT&T that required them to provide telephone service to new rural households.

The idea of carrier of last resort has been part of the telephone industry for nearly as long as the FCC has been regulating the industry. The concept was a key component of spreading the telephone network to all corners of the country – the Congress and the early FCC understood that the whole country was better off if everybody was connected.

Over the years the FCC and various state regulatory commissions ruled that telcos had to make a reasonable effort to connect rural customers. Telcos always had the option to petition against adding customers in really hard to reach places like mountaintops, but for the most part telcos routinely added new homes to the telephone network.

Carrier-of-last-resort started to weaken with the introduction of competition from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Since that time the big telcos have been able to walk away from carrier-of-last-resort obligations in most of their territory. This court order ruled that in areas where the telcos are still receiving federal high cost support that the telcos are still obligated to connect homes that request service.

I worked for Ma Bell pre-divestiture and there was a real pride in the telephone industry that the network reached out to everybody. Telcos then also deployed huge numbers of pay telephones throughout the network to reach those that couldn’t afford phone service – even though they lost money on many of the payphones. The Bell company and the smaller independent telcos made it their mission to extend the network to everybody.

This order made a few comments, though, that puzzled me. They point out that many of the high-cost areas served by the big telcos are up for new funding from the upcoming CAF II auctions. Any winners of that auction are required to file to become the Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) for any areas they receive funding. The discussion in the court order implies that these new ETCs will become the carrier-of-last-resort in these areas.

That surprised me because there are plenty of carriers that have ETC status and yet are not the obligated carrier-of-last-resort. The best example is the same big telcos examined in this case who are the ETC of record for their whole footprints but now only have carrier-of-last-resort obligations for the last most rural areas covered by this case. There have been stories for years of people who built new homes, even in urban areas, and are refused service by both the telco and cable company. The cable companies have no carrier-of-last-resort obligations, but it’s clear that in many places the telcos have been able to walk away from the obligation.

I think that companies seeking the CAF II reverse auction funding might be surprised by this interpretation of the rules. Being carrier-of-last-resort means that a carrier is obligated to build to reach anybody in the covered area that requests telephone service. The reverse auction doesn’t even require total coverage of the covered census blocks and that seems to be in conflict with the court’s interpretation. The reverse auction census blocks are some of the most sparsely populated areas of the country and building to even one remote customer in some of these areas could be extremely expensive.

Unfortunately, the carrier-of-last-resort obligation only applies to telephone service and not to broadband. It would be nice to see this concept applied to broadband and the FCC missed a good opportunity to do this when they handed out billions of federal dollars in the CAF II plan. With that plan the big telcos are only required to make their best effort to reach customers with broadband in the areas that got the CAF II funding – I’m hearing from rural people all over the country that a lot of the CAF II areas aren’t seeing any upgrades. For the most part the idea of carrier-of-last resort and universal coverage are becoming quaint concepts of our past.