Court of Appeals Decision Mt vs. FCC 010604January 21, 2004
By Vic Jackson, Interconnection Services, Inc.
On Friday, January 16, 2004, the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a decision in Mountain Communications, Inc. versus the Federal Communications Commission (No. 02-1255) in which the Court declared that a major portion of the FCC’s July 25, 2002 Order in Mountain Communications, Inc. versus Qwest Communications International, Inc. (FCC 02-220) was “arbitrary and capricious”. In their 2002 decision the FCC ordered Mountain to pay Qwest for what Qwest described as “dedicated toll facilities” that delivered calls from Walsenburg and Colorado Springs, Colorado to Mountain’s point of interconnection with Qwest in Pueblo, Colorado. In June 2000, the FCC had ruled in a similar situation involving TSR Wireless and Qwest that TSR did not have to pay for similar trunk facilities. The DC Court decision means that the FCC must re-consider their Mountain vs Qwest Order and conform it to the Court’s decision.
Mountain Communications is a small paging and telecommunications carrier located in Pueblo, Colorado, but this dispute involved all paging and cellular carriers in the USA. If the FCC's decision in the Mountain case had not been reversed, the landline local telephone companies would have collectively been able to bill millions of dollars per month in facility charges for the, so called, "dedicated toll facilities" that in reality are simply part of the landline telephone local networks.