Data on local telephone exchange company interstaste access services prices and demand are filed publicly at the FCC as part of annual price-cap tariff filings. The datasets below provide both available source data and trans-year compilations of trunking and special-access service records. These records provide data on bandwidth in use, prices, rate structures, and service innovation.
These datasets are intended to facilitate exploratory analysis of bandwidth prices and demand, to spur development of new techniques for analyzing price trends, and to foster better informed public policy deliberation. These datasets are neither official nor authoritative compilations. The official FCC public record of tariff filings is the FCC's Electronic Tariff Filing System (ETFS). Annual access filings for 2003 to 2009 are currently available online. One way to find annual access filings is to search by company name for June 10 to June 20 for the filing year of interest. The files for 2003 to 2009 in the source data compilations included below are named by their file description on ETFS.
Open data platforms contribute to transparency and openness in government and can help to spur rapid innovation. Making public data on bandwidth prices and demand readily available in a form easily to use is a small contribution to the ongoing creation of open data platforms. The organization and categorization of these data, particularly for the years 2001 to 2009, potentially can be greatly improved through open, collaborative, and broadly participitory work. I encourage users of these data to share widely improvements they make to the dataset, to discuss openly their analysis of the data, and to foster more informed public discussion of bandwidth prices, demand, price-cap regulation, and other related aspects of communications policy.