Special Access for Price Cap Local Exchange Carriers; AT&T Corporation Petition for Rulemaking To Reform Regulation of Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier Rates for Interstate Special Access Services

In this Report and Order, the Commission suspends, on an interim basis, the Commission's rules allowing for automatic pricing flexibility grants for special access services, pending adoption of new rules. The Commission suspends its pricing flexibility rules in light of evidence that the proxies for measuring actual and potential special access market competition, which are based on collocation by competitive carriers within a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), do not accurately predict whether competition is sufficient to constrain special access prices and deter anticompetitive practices by price cap local exchange carriers. In the Report and Order, the Commission also initiates a process to obtain data needed to conduct a special access market analysis. Based on this forthcoming data collection, the Commission will undertake a robust special access market analysis to determine the extent to which the special access market is competitive and develop special access pricing flexibility rules to replace the collocation-based competitive showings.