FCC Wireline Bureau Releases Further Comments From BDS Peer Reviewers
FCC staff released new comments from two peer reviewers of a white paper by commission consultant Marc Rysman on the business data service market, which the agency cited in its Further NPRM proposing a new BDS regulatory framework. The comments…
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came in response to updated cable BDS data and associated FCC and Rysman analyses released recently indicating no basic changes (see 1606290045 and 1607080052). They were contained in a Wireline Bureau filing in docket 16-143, the cover letter for which was posted in the Daily Digest Tuesday. Tommaso Valletti, a professor of economics at Imperial College in London, said the recent updates didn't produce any material change to his previous estimates on the effects of facilities-based BDS competition. Andrew Sweeting, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, said he "like[d] the fact that the FCC staff have included new measures of cable presence" in the new analysis. "One might have argued that these connections could provide some substitute competition to the type of 'facilities based building measure' that was included in the previous regressions, especially as it seems that this often reflects actual connections rather than the ability to easily provide a connection." But he said the new results were "a little hard to interpret" and said he didn't have "any clear basis to disagree" with a staff assessment that certain large price effects "are likely to be picking up something" other than what he had postulated in his original peer review. "A simple analysis of summary statistics (whether in terms of demographics, business density, types of customers, and factors that might affect costs of service) might be useful to understand what is going on here," he wrote.