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from: PennLive.com

Verizon Can Limit Access to Services, Pennsylvania PUC Says

From Patriot-News, June 22, 2007
By David DeKok

The state Public Utility Commission voted 3-1 yesterday not to stop Verizon Communications from blocking access by low-income people on the Lifeline program to bundled telephone service packages, even if it could save customers money.

Lifeline is funded by a fee paid by telephone users to the federal Universal Service Fund. It gives qualifying low-income people $8 off their monthly phone bills.

“It’s incomprehensible to me why they would not want their customers to get the discount,” state Consumer Advocate Irwin Popowsky said. “It doesn’t cost Verizon a dime. Pennsylvania consistently gets less than it’s fair share.”

Sharon Shaffer, a spokeswoman for Verizon-Pennsylvania, said the company “is not in favor” of making bundled service packages available to Lifeline customers. The law that created Lifeline in Pennsylvania limited it to “the most basic, limited local phone service,” she said.

But Popowsky said the original law Shaffer quoted was superseded by a law in 2004 that specified Lifeline customers could subscribe to “any number of eligible telecommunications services.”

The Legislature adopted the law after complaints that Verizon had blocked Lifeline customers from getting Caller ID or Call Waiting, but the law did not apply to just those services.

Shaffer said it costs Verizon about $20 to hook up a Lifeline customer, and allowing Lifeline customers access to service packages would strain the Universal Service Fund.

Verizon had asked the PUC to end a requirement imposed in 1990 that forced it to offer customers a basic telephone service package before trying to sell them a more expensive service.

Most customers, Verizon argued last year, now want bundled services, in which local, regional toll and long-distance services are grouped at a single price that is less than if each component was purchased separately.

After Verizon filed its request to end the basic-first requirement, Popowsky sought to attach a condition allowing Lifeline customers to buy packages.

The PUC ruled yesterday, in a motion introduced by Commissioner Terrance Fitzpatrick, that access to a bundled service package would have to be litigated separately.

“We’ve been in negotiations on this for a year,” Popowsky said.

PUC member Kim Pizzingrilli and Chairman Wendell Holland joined Fitzpatrick in voting for the motion.

Vice Chairman James Cawley dissented. He suggested that the majority motion would be a burden on the poor and called it “a waste of resources” to make Popowsky start over again.