In June, the FCC requested the industry to refresh the record regarding a 2020 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (Notice) in Docket 20-71 in which it proposed to eliminate ex ante (forecasted) pricing regulation of end user Telephone Access Charges (TACs) and require incumbent and competitive LECs (ILECs and CLECs) to detariff these charges. In the Commission’s parlance, end user Telephone Access Charges include the Subscriber Line Charge (SLC), the Access Recovery Charge (ARC), the Presubscribed Interexchange Carrier Charge (PICC), the Line Port Charge, and the Special Access Surcharge. These charges are described below:
Subscriber Line Charge – The FCC’s access charge system required long-distance companies to pay local exchange carriers for originating and terminating long-distance calls. Those inter-carrier charges did not, however, recover the entire cost of the local loop—the connection between an end user and its local exchange carrier. Instead, the Commission created the Subscriber Line Charge as the mechanism through which local exchange carriers recover a portion of the costs of their local loops through a flat per-line fee assessed monthly on end users.
Access Recovery Charge – Created in 2011 as part of new rules requiring local exchange carriers to reduce, over a period of years, many of their switched access charges assessed on interexchange carriers, with the goal of transitioning inter-carrier compensation to a bill-and-keep regime. The Commission adopted a transitional recovery mechanism, the ARC, to mitigate the impact of reduced inter-carrier compensation revenues on incumbent local exchange carriers and to facilitate continued investment in broadband-capable infrastructure. IXCs may assess an Access Recovery Charge on customers in the form of a monthly fixed charge.
Presubscribed Interexchange Carrier Charge – A largely phased out monthly fixed charge assessed by LECs on presubscribed long-distance providers to recover a portion of the common line costs not recovered by the Subscriber Line Charge.
Line Port Charge – A monthly end-user charge that recovers costs associated with digital lines, such as integrated services digital network (ISDN) line ports, to the extent those port costs exceed the costs for a line port used for basic, analog service.
Special Access Surcharge – The $25 per month Special Access Surcharge is assessed on trunks that could “leak” traffic into the public switched network. This charge is almost never charged today.
As when it filed original comments in 2020, the industry for a variety of reasons, opposes the detariffing of these end user Telephone Access Charges. For example, INCOMPAS notes the administrative mess telephone companies would face if these charges were eliminated.
These reforms are not only unnecessary but would impose significant operational burdens on competitive providers without delivering clear public interest benefits. TACs are currently well-understood, stable, and effectively administered through existing tariff and billing systems, particularly by business and enterprise customers. Replacing these mechanisms would require costly system overhauls, internal retraining, customer education efforts, and updated compliance procedures across multiple jurisdictions all for charges that are declining in relevance but remain important to the competitive framework of the market. (Docket 20-71, INCOMPAS Comments, filed August 4, 2025, at p. 2).
Moreover, NTCA – The Rural Broadband Association points out, many of these charges are still important to small LECs.
Like universal service support, SLCs and ARCs represent an important component of the business case for smaller operators serving rural and remote areas, and hindering (if not all but eliminating) the ability of RLECs to recover these revenues through mandatory detariffing would undermine the sustainability of these small businesses and the networks they operate. These charges help to simplify cost recovery, minimize customer confusion and uncertainty, and reduce burdens for NTCA members. By contrast, mandatory detariffing would introduce unnecessary complexity and create uncertainties regarding how, and even whether, carriers can recover these revenues otherwise. (Id., NTCA Comments, filed August 6, 2025, at p. 3)
Finally, as customers continue to move from voice lines to mobile and VoIP lines, these charges will phase out without Commission action. USTelecom states that
Given the numerous recent actions taken by the Bureau and Commission to accelerate carriers’ transition away from the “outdated and deteriorating legacy networks and obsolete services”—in particular, the copper-based voice services to which Telephone Access Charges apply—a continued shift away from tariffed legacy services to detariffed services will occur naturally. That is because Telephone Access Charges are limited to legacy POTS and do not apply to VoIP services or mobile voice, they will continue to phase out with the ongoing shift to modern voice services. Prematurely mandating the elimination of such charges, however, could actually delay this evolution as carriers would need to devote resources to detariffing efforts rather than developing and deploying next-generation networks and advanced communications services. (Id., USTelecom Comments, filed August 6, 2025, at p. 2).
Based on the comments of the industry it appears highly unlikely the FCC will take any actions to detariff these end-user access charges.