Verizon Rethinks Long-Distance Bid in Mass.

Verizon Communications (www.verizon.com) withdrew its bid at the FCC (www.fcc.gov) to offer long-distance service in Massachusetts and plans to refile its Section 271 application soon with the federal agency, company officials said.

“We'll refile quickly,” Verizon spokeswoman Susan Butta says. “The timing is complicated by the upcoming holidays, but we'll refile during or immediately after the holidays.”

The FCC was set to rule on Verizon’s application before the end of the month. However, Verizon explained today that procedural concerns exist regarding whether all parties have had ample opportunity to evaluate and comment on Verizon’s provisioning to DSL rivals of non-discriminatory access to unbundled loops.

Competitors charged that Verizon hadn’t satisfied all the regulatory requirements necessary to begin to provide interLATA service, and noted that Verizon’s record of meeting such requirements has been spotty.

But Verizon contends that its Massachusetts application “is the strongest one that any company has filed with the FCC yet,” according to Tom Tauke, Verizon’s senior vice president of external affairs and public policy. “We believe that we have satisfied the 14-point checklist” contained in Sec. 271 of the Telecom Act.

“Refiling will address these concerns by allowing interested parties additional comment,” Tauke adds. “We also will update the existing application with the most current data that further confirms that we do provide parity of service for DSL.”

CLEC lobbyist the Association for Local Telecommunications Services (www.alts.org) has claimed that Verizon data shows that Verizon’s provisioning of UNEs to CLECs has worsened, even while the incumbent’s provisioning to its own retail customers improves. All the FCC graphs drawn from Verizon’s Performance Monitoring Reports reveal evidence of its failure to provide CLECs loops and other UNEs and services at parity with its own retail provisioning, according to ALTS General Counsel Jonathan Askin.

But Tauke says that there is robust competition in the Massachusetts telecom market where roughly 700,000 customer lines are served by competitors, about 11 percent of the total lines in the state.

The Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy (www.state.ma.us/dpu), which spent almost two years reviewing Verizon’s data, recommended Oct. 16 to the FCC that the BOC has met the Telecom Act requirements and should be permitted to enter the long-distance market there.

“We remain confident that when the FCC evaluates the complete record, it will expeditiously conclude that we have more than satisfied all the requirements," Tauke said during a press conference yesterday.

Verizon filed its Massachusetts long-distance application with the FCC on Sept. 22 following the state's review and independent OSS tests.

Following an approval in Massachusetts, the 271 plan for the other states in Verizon's region will be to file in Connecticut and then in Rhode Island. After that, Verizon will make a 271 filing in Pennsylvania, followed by another in New Jersey.

Tauke mentioned that the Sec. 271 filings for Pennsylvania and New Jersey most likely would be filed with the FCC in second quarter 2001.

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