The Southwestern Bell Telephone Price and Demand Dataset (SWPD) contains public data on prices and demand for interstate rate elements in the historical Southwestern Bell Telephone service area from 1993 to 2009. The source data are interstate access price-cap tariff filings made publicly at the FCC. The SWPD compiles and organizes all records listed in the available rate detail files that are part of Southwestern Bell Telephone’s annual access filings. The dataset is a tab-delimited text file with the field names as the first record. It is named "sw rd 1993-2009 v2.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 Southwestern Bell Telephone service area consists of customer premises in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. A newly formed holding company named SBC Communications, Inc. formally incorporated the Southwestern Bell Telephone operating company in 1995. SBC subsequently acquired Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, Southern New England Telecommunications Corporation, and BellSouth. SBC acquired AT&T in 2005 and assumed the name AT&T.
Data reported in Southwestern Bell Telephone’s rate detail filings are missing some records and fields in 1993 and 1999. The 1993 rate detail are available only for some trunking-basket rate elements. The 1999 rate detail source filing is missing state and zone codes. Rate elements for all states and zones apparently are included, but not distinguished. Some state codes for rate elements in the inter-exchange basket are included in the 1999 data.
The SWPD includes two filings for filing year 1998. To aid comparisons over time, the year-representative filing (the filing best representing the annual access filing) is identified with the code y in the field yrf.
The SWPD price-cap basket sums have been validated against the sums reported in Southwestern Bell Telephone’s annual access filing Tariff Review Plans (TRPs). The rate detail for 1994 precedes the TRP by about two months and reflects slightly different rates. The 1998 rate detail reports slightly different calendar year 1997 demand than does the 1998 TRP RTE (see especially multiline business & PRI ISDN demand). Differences in the common line basket from 2001 to 2004 are a result of the omission of USAC receipts in the rate detail for those years. For detailed data, see the “basket revenue” and “1998 common line” sheets (also available as Southwestern Bell rates and demand Excel workbook).
Some inconsistencies between reported revenue and calculated revenue (demand times rate) exist in the source files for rate elements in 2009. The inconsistencies seem to arise from demand and rates being reported in 2009 with less precision than was used for calculating the reported revenue.
Southwestern Bell Telephone’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 “revenue elements” and “MVP discounts” spreadsheets (also available in the Southwestern Bell Excel workbook.
Note that in summing records from the SWPD, total lines should be excluded. The individual, bottom-level rate-elements are coded with line-type=“e”.
For additional data-specific notes (mostly minor) on the SWPD, see southwestern-bell-notes.txt
The rate-detail source files used to the construct the SWPD are available in the rate detail archive. Southwestern Bell’s TRPs are available in the TRP archive.
SWPD 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 |
|
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) |
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”).