Battered and bruised by the market and recent signals from the FCC that the telecom battle would largely be a cableco/RBOC fight going forward, a ruling by The Supreme Court this week reasserting TELRIC offered competitive carriers a ray of hope.
TELRIC is the formula used to compute how much the RBOCs can charge to resell their facilities to competitors. Since the Telecom Act of 1996 was passed, the Bells have been contesting the rules ordering them to make lines available to newcomer carriers and the prices at which they are required to do so.
"We cannot say whether the passage of time will show competition prompted by TELRIC to be an illusion, but TELRIC appears to be a reasonable policy for now, and that is all that counts," Justice David Souter, writing for the court, said on Monday.\
The goal in backing existing TELRIC rules is to allow for continued and increased competition among telecom/datacom service providers, which is expected to keep consumer prices under control. But Verizon Communications, the loser in the case, and the other RBOCs say they can’t recover their costs under the TELRIC system. BellSouth Corp. released the following statement following the ruling: "Today's decision maintains an unfortunate status quo: BellSouth must continue to provide pieces of its network to competitors at below-cost prices. This status quo discourages investment by both us and our competitors, resulting in poorer choices for customers. We hope the FCC will correct this incorrect pricing policy and eliminate its unnecessary requirements to provide certain network pieces in dockets now pending before it."
