Bruce Kushnick Says WISPs Deserve a Small Business Exemption from Proposed FCC Reporting Rules

Virtually all WISPA members, both ISPs and vendors, are small businesses.

The Federal government’s Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a small business depending on its industry. Wireless Telecommunications Carriers (subsector 517) are those with 1,500 employees or fewer. Computer Manufacturers (subsector 334) are small businesses if they have less than 500 employees or less than 1,000 employees, depending on the devices made. “Software Publishers” are small businesses if their annual revenues are less than $25 million.

Therefore, most WISPA members (but not all) are small businesses and could benefit from exemptions if they were written into new rules.

Steve Coran recently warned on the Rini Coran blog that the FCC will soon set reporting requirements for outages of broadband and VoIP. Outages would have to be reported to the FCC within 120 minutes of their occurrence.

In a separate post, Coran notes that public safety agencies support reporting requirements and businesses oppose them, even though the data would be kept secret.

In the Federal Register, the FCC says that outages are a serious problem because, “Broadband networks now carry a substantial volume of 9–1–1 traffic. They are also a significant form of communications in times of crisis. Communications outages to broadband facilities threaten the public’s ability to summon in emergency situations.”

The FCC claims, “The proposed rules in the NPRM are generally consistent with current industry practices, so the costs of compliance should be small.”

The FCC might want to consider whether the costs of compliance might fall heavier on a small town WISP than they would fall on, say, AT&T.

Kushnick says the FCC fails to protect small businesses

Anti-ILEC activist Bruce Kushnick (of Teletruth and the New Networks Institute) says that the FCC has failed numerous times in the past to protect small businesses and has also failed to keep promises made to small businesses.

Kushnick recently published an article explaining how the large phone companies purchased spectrum allocated to small businesses in FCC auctions. He says that the FCC has failed to protect small wireless providers from the monopoly power of the large cellular companies (which also happen to be heavily subsidised telephone companies).

Kushnick says the FCC has also failed to ever comply with the Regulatory Flexibility Act, a law that says that regulators have to detail the impact of their policies on small business. As far as Kushnick knows (and he’s been watching the FCC carefully for about 20 years), the FCC has never stated how any of its policies might effect small businesses. His New Networks Institute filed a petition to the FCC, noting the failure, in 2003 and he says he never received a real response — and that the FCC never studied how its rules might harm small businesses.

“Since the FCC has harmed the spectrum market in general and small WISP businesses in particular, they should have an exemption from FCC regulations that are designed to limit the monopoly power of the phone companies,” Kushnick says.

The FCC is supposed to be helping expand broadband service to rural areas, but the National Broadband Plan’s spectrum policy has to be “revenue neutral” which means, in practice, that spectrum policy has to be paid for by AT&T and Verizon, Kushnick notes. That, in turn, means little no progressive spectrum policy, and little benefit to the rural areas that are the intended beneficiaries of the plan.

Kushnick says that the WISP industry is already serving rural areas that were abandoned long ago by the cellular telephone monopolies. The WISP industry should be exempt from rules that are intended to limit the harm caused by communications monopolies because the burden of rules on small businesses could be extreme. These rules are designed to apply to massive corporations. The FCC does not and should not wish to harm rural broadband with the same rules.