Great news for MuniWireless and for VOIP — and also highly relevant to the MuniWireless event I am currently attending…
The Federal Communications Commission has lifted one barrier to wider VoIP use, ruling late last week that rural telephone companies must allow VoIP calls from other carriers to connect to their local lines. Regulators in Nebraska and South Carolina had ruled that VoIP calls could be blocked from connecting to local ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers), saying that traffic from some VoIP service providers wasn’t considered a “telecommunications service” and could therefore be blocked.
Those decision led Time Warner Cable to file a petition with the FCC in March 2006, asking it to rule that wholesale telecommunications carriers were entitled to hook up with rural networks and force the ILECs to carry their VoIP traffic. Time Warner pointed to other states such as Ohio, New York, Illinois, and Iowa that have forced ILECs to carry all traffic, regardless of where it originated. In its ruling, the FCC found that the Communications Services Act of 1934 “does not differentiate” between telecommunications service providers, and the question of whether the services offered were wholesale or retail, “traditional” voice or VoIP, were irrelevant. [Ars Technica]
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