1. Summary
Public Utilities (P.U.) Code § 451 requires that telecommunications carriers provide a level of service "...as necessary to promote the safety, health, comfort, and convenience of its patrons...and the public." In Decision (D.) 09-07-019 issued on July 9, 2009, the California Public Utilities Commission (Commission) adopted General Order (GO) 133-C which contains a minimum set of service quality standards and measures for installation, maintenance, and operator services for local exchange telephone services. The Commission has a statutory duty to ensure that telephone corporations provide customer service that includes reasonable statewide service quality standards including, but not limited to, standards regarding network technical quality, customer service, installation, repair and billing. (D.09-07-019 at 12, P.U. Code § 2896.)
In March 2011, the Communications Division (CD) issued a report pursuant to GO 133-C § 7 regarding the quality of telephone service provided by wireline telephone corporations in 2010. (Attachment A to this Order). The report noted the substandard results reported in the GO 133-C service quality reports filed by the carriers in 2010. Additionally, the report provided information regarding the responses of Pacific Bell Telephone Company dba AT&T California (AT&T) and Verizon California Inc. (Verizon) to the outage event that affected approximately 250,000 customers in Southern California during the winter storms of December 2010 and January 2011. The Southern California outage event was not reflected in AT&T's and Verizon's GO 133-C service quality reports for December 2010 or January 2011 because current rules exempt carriers from reporting outages caused by a catastrophic event1. The report also provided CD's observations with regard to GO 133-C service quality reporting. For example, carriers have different interpretations of the calculation methods of the measures, and the underlying raw data submitted to the Commission were often incomplete or not in a format that allowed staff to reproduce carriers' reported results. CD recommended opening an Order Instituting Rulemaking (OIR) to address carriers' compliance issues and to re-evaluate the existing service quality measures and standards.
The Commission received letters from industry parties regarding CD's March 2011 Report. All except Verizon endorsed the opening of a rulemaking to review carrier service quality performance. In addition, the non-carrier parties suggested that network degradation due to deferred or no maintenance was the primary cause of the extended outages during the winter storms of December 2010 through January 2011, as well as AT&T and Verizon's inability to meet the Out-of-Service (OOS) repair goals in 2010. Additionally, the Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) stated that there are competitive implications for poor service quality because of their reliance on the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) copper facilities.
The Commission opens this rulemaking proceeding to review telecommunications carriers' performance in meeting GO 133-C service quality performance standards in 2010, and to assess whether the existing GO 133-C service quality standards and measures meet the goals of the Commission, are relevant to the current regulatory environment and market, and whether there is a need to establish a penalty mechanism for substandard service quality performance. The questions posed and the answers we elicit are intended to address the issues of this rulemaking.
1 GO 133-C defines catastrophic event as: "an event where there is a declaration of a state of emergency by a federal or state authority, and a widespread service outage (an outage affecting at least 3% of the carrier's customers in the state) are circumstances beyond the carrier's control."
