Industry Leader in Telecom Data Analytics and Revenue Assurance

"A person doesn’t know how much they have to be thankful for - until they have to pay taxes on it."

Whether you’re a large ILEC, or a small rural voice provider, with every 499 submitted to the FCC carriers and their customers contribute a percentage of their international or interstate calls to the USF. While the USF has proven it’s importance with the introduction of rural broadband support and other funding grants, there’s an ongoing dilemma in regards to how carriers contribute to the USF.

Much of this dilemma stems from the FCC’s Contribution Factor and Safe Harbor Rate that many providers default to using to file their 499s.

Complying with the USAC’s requirements can be stressful. However, being non-compliant during the pre-testing phase isn’t the end of the world. In fact - it’s part of the process in most providers' deployment journeys. 

As we jump into the fourth quarter of ACAM-I pretesting and prepare for the upcoming 2022 official testing, it’s important that providers determine what tactics they used to be successful this past year.

Phone calls have no boundaries, borders, or language barriers. However, billing for them does. 

If your company received a lawful request for specific Call Detail Records from three years ago to help with a current criminal investigation, would you be able to fulfill the request?

In our regulatory work, we’ve worked with carriers who get many subpoena requests, and we’ve had carriers that can’t remember the last time they got one. We’ve found that smaller providers don’t receive too many warrants or requests, but larger ISPs are routinely asked for this information. 

It's no question that the Universal Service Fund (USF) has proven it's value in creating an all-inclusive broadband network. However, the rising costs of USF fees have caused many industry professionals to call for a change in how service providers contribute to the fund. 

In our regulatory work, we're often shocked at how many providers don’t know that there are ways to cut their overall USF contribution to be a fraction of what it is now. 

To give a brief overview of the USF, it’s split between four separate funds;

• Low-income Lifeline fund
• Rural Healthcare fund (RHC)
• E-Rate: For Schools and Libraries
• High-cost fund
  

The ongoing adoption of a full IP network and changing regulatory environment demands that telecom service providers examine their network infrastructure to determine how they can change operations to increase efficiency and profitability. Many communications service providers are constrained by legacy tandem networks that are difficult and expensive to maintain. This has caused telcos to consolidate their older tandem switches to extend other’s life cycles or upgrading to more modern tandems. In each case, the process of moving network lines from one switch to another has been coined with the term rehoming. 

With the first quarter of performance testing behind us, we’d like to reflect on how our stamper technology performed. As we rolled out hundreds of stamper box devices across the United States, our years of experience in telecom were put to the test to adapt to new challenges that performance measures testing created. 

Underground utilities have become a vital aspect of local infrastructure across the United States. Even though they are critical to our everyday lives, little is being done to protect them.

If you’ve ever worked on any projects at home that required digging, I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase call-before-you-dig. Contacting your local utility companies to mark out pipelines before you dig can be the difference between rupturing an underground gas line and not. People often underestimate how important it is to know where these buried utilities are, even when doing smaller tasks like installing a mailbox. According to the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) 2019 Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) Report, it’s estimated that there were 532,000 excavation-related damages to underground utilities in 2019, which is a 4.5 percent increase from the 509,000 damages that occurred in 2018.

Did you know that the costs of complying with federal, state and local subpoenas can be passed along to the requesting authorities?

The big providers of telephone, cable, and data services process hundreds of law enforcement requests for data every month. If you are a smaller provider, you may not get that many requests but when you do it’s a major disruption to your operation. We have had several requests from smaller clients to support them in their efforts to comply with subpoena requests so we thought we would summarize how the CALEA process works.

ATS is proud to announce that Andrew Fleming has been appointed Senior Adviser for the Utility industry. Andy is very well known in the industry and his professional experience spans nearly 50 years. Andy started his career as a Sales Engineer for the Sundstrand Corporation. He went on to become the District Sales Manager for Dresser Industries in the Northeastern US Region. In his most recent positions he represented Dresser Pipeline Solutions, Meters and Instruments.

Among Mr. Fleming’s professional affiliations are the American Gas Association, the Society of Gas Operators and the Northeast Gas Association. Mr. Fleming holds a BS in Industrial Distribution from Clarkson University.