The Ameritech Telco Price and Demand Dataset (ATPD) contains public data on prices and demand for interstate rate elements in the historical Ameritech service area from 1993 to 2009. Ameritech is a large U.S. local telephone operating company. The source data are interstate access price-cap tariff filings made publicly at the FCC. The ATPD compiles and organizes all records listed in the available rate detail files that are part of Ameritech’s annual access filings. The dataset is a tab-delimited text file with the field names as the first record. It is named "ameritech rd 1994-2009 v1.txt".
This dataset is intended to foster better understanding of communications industry developments, keener appreciation for the realities of economic regulation, and more informed public policy deliberation. This is dataset neither an official nor authoritative compilation. 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 compilation are named by their file description on ETFS.
The historical Ameritech service area consists of customer premises in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. A newly formed holding company named SBC Communications, Inc. formally incorporated the Ameritech operating company in 1995. SBC subsequently acquired Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, Southern New England Telecommunications Corporation, and Bell South. SBC acquired AT&T in 2005 and assumed the name AT&T.
Ameritech rate detail filings for 1996 and 2002 could not be located and thus are not included in the dataset. The ATPD includes two different rate detail filings for each of the years 1999 and 2009. The filing judged to represent better the correct annual filing rate detail is coded with “y” in the field yrf; the other filing has yrf=n.
For filing years 1994 to 1999, the rate detail files do not report current revenue (crev) and proposed revenue (prev). Variables crev-s and prev-s include revenue calculated from reported demand and rates for the years 1994 to 1999, and reported revenue for the years 2000 to 2009.
The ATPD price-cap basket sums have been validated against the sums reported in Ameritech’s annual access filing Tariff Review Plans (TRPs). The 1999 rate detail filing is missing all the TRP-reported inter-exchange basket and marketing basket revenue. The 1999 rate detail filing is also missing 1.3% of TRP-reported trunking revenue. The 2000 rate detail is missing 0.9% of common-line basket revenue due to non-reporting of “EUCL other” revenue. Revenue reported in the rate detail differs by less than 0.2% from revenue reported in the TRPs for all other years.
For the filing years in which the rate detail files report revenue (2000-2009), the reported revenue is consistent with revenue calculated from the reported demands and rates, except for some trunking-basket elements in the non-reference filing for 2009.
Ameritech’s rate detail files include considerable revenue associated with rate elements that do not have meaningful demand (units sold) or rates. These include rate elements summing miscellaneous revenue, expediting charge revenue, and cancellation charge revenue, as well as discount revenue (reported as negative revenue). See the worksheets “credits,” “expedite revenue,” and “misc revenue” in the workbook “ameritech rd review.xls”.
Note that in summing records from the ATPD, total lines should be excluded. The individual, bottom-level rate-elements are coded with line-type=“e”.
The rate-detail source files used to the construct the ATPD are available in the rate detail archive. Ameritech’s TRPs are available in the TRP archive.
ATPD Technical Specification
Dataset Fields
|
Field name |
Source |
Description |
|
year |
a |
filing year; see date table for dates of rates |
|
yrf |
a |
reference filing for year (“y”) or other (“n”); indicates filing best representative of annual access filing |
|
date |
a |
filing date; some years include multiple filings distinguished by date |
|
ln |
a |
record sequence number, based on sequence in the source file |
|
basket |
a |
price-cap basket name |
|
line-type |
a |
“e” – rate element; “t” – total line |
|
cat1 |
a |
identified DS1, DS3, LT-1, and LT-3 rate elements |
|
cat2 |
a |
categorizes charges associated with DS1, DS3, LT-1, and LT-3 rate elements |
|
pkg-size |
a |
indicates size of DS3/LT-3 packages codes as cat2=pkg |
|
term |
a |
purchase commitment term indicated in the rate element description |
|
lname |
s |
service description; in some cases contains header line text |
|
state |
s |
state for which rate element is applicable; null if whole region |
|
zone |
s |
zone for which rate element is applicable; null if whole region |
|
demand |
s |
previous year's demand (base period demand); for elements charged monthly, it's the sum of charged elements across months |
|
crate |
s |
current price for rate element, existing about June 15 of year of filing |
|
prate |
s |
proposed price for rate element, proposed to go into effect about July 1 of year of filing |
|
crev |
s |
current price times previous year's demand (crate * demand) |
|
prev |
s |
proposed price time previous year's demand (prate * demand) |
|
crev-s |
a |
crev augmented with calculated crev for years in which crev was not reported |
|
prev-s |
a |
prev augmented with calculated prev for years in which prev was not reported |
Note: The source column above indicates whether the field is directly from the source data (“s”) or an added classification of the source data (“a”). Added classifications follow directly from text in element description (lname).
For additional data-specific notes (mostly minor) on the ATPD, see ameritech-notes.txt