USTelecom, Members Raise USF Compliance Issues on HUBB Mapping

USTelecom sought clarification from the FCC and Universal Service Administrative Co. about how USF compliance might be called into question if participants in the high cost universal broadband portal edit their broadband mapping data as geocoding technologies improve. USTelecom said "a change to the fourth digit of a geocoded decimal (representing a change in accuracy of about 10 meters) would be a workable demarcation point for determining a change that required a deletion." Deleting and resubmitting a location would erase the year a broadband location was originally deployed, it said. "If a carrier 'deleted' a number of locations for a certain year and then those same locations were re-uploaded in the HUBB with a different deployment year, it could retroactively call into question the carrier's compliance." USTelecom with members AT&T, CenturyLink, Consolidated, Frontier and Windstream met with USAC and the FCC Wireline Bureau staff Wednesday, and the association said, posted Monday in docket 10-90, it "understood that if the carrier had previously met a deployment year's milestone, and then, by virtue of 'deleting' and resubmitting locations with better geocodes, fell under the milestone for a particular year," there would be no penalty "as long as the cumulative number of locations submitted to date for the life of the program remained above the current threshold."