Five Fundamentals for the Phone Network Transition

For decades, the phone network in the U.S. has quietly and reliably provided benefits to the American public. These benefits have become so firmly engrained in the U.S. economy, public safety systems, and personal communications that users take for granted the consumer protections and competition policies that make them possible. These benefits were not a happy accident — they were the result of deliberate communications policies that demanded a telecommunications network that served its users first and foremost. But technical changes to the underlying telecommunications network are putting those policies — and everything that they make possible — in jeopardy. Even today, on a daily — if not hourly — basis, users enjoy the benefits of the structural protections built around the phone network. We conduct our business and personal communications as if we can always trust that the phone network will just work — because it will. When the power goes out during a natural disaster, landline phones will still be powered through the copper line connecting it to the back-up power of the central office. When someone calls a friend on another phone network, that call will always go through — regardless of which carriers the two users subscribe to or where they each live. When the bill comes for that call, the user can rest assured that there will be no fraudulent charges and the carrier will not have “traded” her to another carrier without her permission. And in the rare instance that any part of this system breaks down, we know that there are government authorities at the local, state, and federal levels equipped to fix the problem and protect users’ interests.Every piece of the world described above exists because of a complex system of laws and regulations that ensure the existence of an accessible, affordable, reliable phone system. This system results in a phone system that operates so effortlessly from the user’s perspective, many do not know of the regulatory structure underpinning the network. But they may discover its importance soon. This regulatory structure is now being called into question as carriers shift their networks from traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) technology to Internet protocol (IP) technology.As carriers transition their networks to rely on IP technology, rules that have so far relied upon the existence of the traditional, public-switched telephone network (PSTN) may not extend to newer IP-based networks. This is true even though the offering of basic phone service remains largely unchanged from the user’s perspective and users’ expectations of the benefits that come along with “phone service” remain the same.The transition of the PSTN involves many technical and policy issues. These will be impossible to navigate in any coherent way without a basic framework. The framework will lay out the fundamental values that underlie our communications networks and use them to guide policy proposals going forward. This paper puts forward the framework of Five Fundamentals that underlie our phone network: service to all Americans, interconnection and competition, consumer protection, network reliability, and public safety. These principles have motivated communications policy for the past 100 years, and continue to serve the same basic social goals that they have always served, even as the technology used to achieve them changes.