Summary

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TA96 or the Act) was a major step in the process of opening previously monopolistic local telephone service markets to competition. To foster competition, the act requires the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) to provide competing carriers access to any necessary ILEC infrastructure, including the incumbents' operations support systems (OSS). OSS includes pre-ordering, ordering, provisioning, maintenance, billing, and other functions necessary to providing various telephony services. For competition to occur, the competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) must be able to access these services in the same manner as the ILEC.

For example, for pre-ordering, a CLEC must be able to access customer information relevant to the service being ordered, so that the CLEC can tell its customers what options they have. For ordering, a CLEC needs to be sure that the ordering process for its customers takes no more time than for ILEC customers. Similarly, for provisioning, a CLEC needs to be sure that the time the ILEC takes to actually install or provide a new telephone service for CLEC customers is no longer than for ILEC customers. Delays or inaccuracies in these and the other OSS functions could discourage potential customers from doing business with the competitors.

Under its authority to implement the Act, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has required that regulatory remedies be established to ensure ILEC OSS performance does not present barriers to competition. This is also a prerequisite for Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) being allowed to provide in-region interLATA service under § 271. As a consequence, we must establish a performance remedies plan that will identify and prevent or remove any barriers. The three critical steps for any performance remedies plan are performance measurement, performance assessment, and the corrective actions necessary if performance is deemed harmful to competition. The California Public Utilities Commission (Commission or CPUC) has established performance measures in a parallel proceeding in this docket. Our decision today establishes an interim performance assessment plan. We have created a set of procedures for assessing the performance measurement results to identify competitive barriers. In effect, we have set forth a self-executing decision model that applies barrier-identifying criteria to the performance measurement results. A self-executing plan is one that requires no further review and no new proceedings. Explicit, objective, data-based standards are established that automatically calculate and determine the existence of "competitive barrier" performance. Statistical tests identify barriers when ILEC performance to its own customers can be compared to ILEC performance to CLEC customers. Explicit performance levels, called benchmarks, identify barriers when there is no comparable ILEC performance.

This decision model now enables us to proceed to the final step of the remedies plan, establishing the incentives that will be tied to any deficient performance identified by the model. The overall goal of the plan will be to ensure compliance with the FCC's directive that OSS performance shall provide competitors a true opportunity to compete.