Tag: Urban Rate Survey

The FCC collects retail prices annually from urban carriers for landline telephone and broadband services. These prices are used to determine benchmark rates for rural areas for incumbent local exchange rate-of-return carriers, incumbent price-cap carriers receiving CAF Phase II support, recipients of the Rural Broadband Experimental grants, and winners of the recent Connect America Fund Phase II Auction.

I find it ironic that the FCC says they no longer regulate broadband, yet they still define maximum broadband rates allowed for various classes of carriers. The fact is that there are still numerous ways that the FCC is regulating broadband and since many of these mandates come from Congress the FCC will never be able to back out of broadband regulations entirely.

The FCC publishes spreadsheets summarizing of the rates they collected. The benchmark rate for voice defines the highest and lowest rates that are allowable by the affected carriers. Starting in 2019 the lowest rate that can be charged for residential voice is $26.98 and the highest is $51.61.

The following table is for the residential broadband rates listed by AT&T in North Carolina, where I live. The rates listed are non-discounted rates and many customers pay less due to bunding or to negotiating a lower rate. It is striking to me that AT&T charges $70 per month for a 10/1 Mbps connection on DSL and also for a 100/100 Mbps connection on fiber. This is one of the issues that has rural customers up in arms – they pay high prices for less performance, particularly considering that they often only receive a fraction of the published speeds shown in the table. It’s also worth noting that AT&T has a monthly data cap on every product other than their symmetrical gigabit product.

The benchmarks for broadband are extremely high and it’s doubtful that many carriers are even trying to charge the rates shown in the table below. There are separate rate caps calculated for Alaska and the rest of the US.

This is one of the exercises that the FCC must go through that seems largely meaningless. They set a really high rate cap for those that participate in various FCC subsidy programs – but realistically it’s unlikely that many carriers would want to charge more than $100.85 for a 50/5 Mbps connection – but if they did, customers have a legal recourse. What’s more valuable from this exercise is seeing the list prices of the larger urban ISPs – something that’s getting harder to find on line.