Service volumes, prices, and revenues for the interstate communication services of price-cap-regulated U.S. telephone companies are filed publicly at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as part of annual access price-cap tariff filings. Public filings for filing years 1992 to 2009 are now available in an unofficial rate-detail public archive. The archive is also available as a bulk download. The archive consists of Lotus 1-2-3 .wk3 and .wk4 format spreadsheets without any standard data format. Filings for some companies in some years (particularly 2002, and before 1994) could not be located and hence are not in the archive.
The datasets listed below compile the rate detail to make it more easily accessible and useful. Because the demand (units sold) figures refer to the calendar year preceding the filing year, the demand data cover 1991 to 2008, while the rates (prices) cover 1992 to 2009. In addition, the Bell-Atlantic and US West Bandwidth Datasets include units sold in 1989 and 1990, and prices for 1990 and 1991.
Note that demand (units sold) and rates (prices) in these datasets are stated on a monthly basis. Thus, for example, when examining line counts, the demand (units sold) must be divided by 12 to get the average lines in use for the demand year.
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 from June 10 to June 20 for the filing year of interest. The files for 2003 to 2009 in the source archives are named by their file description on ETFS.
These datasets are intended to foster better understanding of communications industry developments, keener appreciation for the realities of economic regulation, and more informed public policy deliberation. Open data platforms contribute to transparency and openness in government and can help to spur rapid innovation. Making U.S. telephone companies' public tariff data publicly available in formats more accessible and more convenient for analysis is a small contribution to the ongoing creation of open data platforms. Many telephone companies' rate detail data remain in formats difficult to access and analyze. I encourage everyone to create new datasets with the source filings, to share widely datasets and improvements to them, to discuss openly their analysis of the data, and to foster more informed public discussion of communication services, rates, and regulation.