The Price-Cap Review Dataset (PCRD) contains data on demand, rates, and revenue for selected U.S. local telephone companies from 1992 to 2009. These data have been publicly filed at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as part of annual access tariff filings. The filings are Tariff Review Plans (TRPs) for price-cap regulated local telephone companies.[1] The TRPs describe ILECs interstate access rates and provide for review of rate changes. The PCRD compiles a key section of the TRPs in order to facilitate exploratory analysis of local telephone services and price-cap regulation and to foster better informed public policy deliberation.
This dataset is 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 through ETFS. 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 main elements of the PCRD are the tab-delimited text files "rte 1992-2009 v3.txt" and "template v3.txt". Some summary statistics from the PCRD are available in an interstate voice access demand spreadsheet (Excel version). A relational database such as OpenOffice.org Base or Microsoft Access is the best means for using the dataset.
The file PCRD notes.txt provides minor data notes and descriptions of the most significant changes across versions of the PCRD.
You should verify and validate figures in this dataset as appropriate for your particular purposes. All available TRPs can be downloaded in bulk from the TRP archive. The rate detail files that are the basis for the figures in the TRPs are also available. Intermediate-form compilations of the TRP RTE sections are also available (rte 1992-1999, rte 2000-2009). These intermediate forms include some descriptive lines not included in the PCRD.
You can show appreciation for the public availability of the PCRD by notifying Douglas Galbi about any errors you discover in it, by improving and extending the dataset, and by sharing your extensions and analysis of the dataset with everyone.
The FCC standardizes yearly the form of the TRP that all filing carriers use. The PCRD is construted from the RTE section of the TRPs. Almost all the ILEC-specific data included in the TRP are in a TRP section labeled RTE-1 (rate review section 1). Because TRPs filed from 1992 to the present include only one RTE section, RTE is used here to refer to the TRP section labeled RTE-1. That section is also written as RTE1 in some FCC orders.
A category of data not included in the RTE are exogenous costs for the filing year. Exogenous cost items are sale of exchanges, regulatory fees, excess deferred taxes, Investment Tax Credit (ITC) amortization, “removal of low end adjustment”, “trueup prior sharing / low end adjustment”, “current low end adjustment”, telecommunications relay services (communications services for persons with disabilities), “reg/non-reg” (changes in the allocation of costs between regulated and unregulated activities), North American Numbering Plan (NANP) expenses, removal of thousand block number pooling (TBNP), and other exogenous expenses that an ILEC claims, e.g. some payphone expenses and some local-number portability (LNP) expenses. The RTE includes price-cap indices (PCIs), actual price indices (APIs), and sub-band price indices (SBIs). Exogenous cost items not included in the RTE are important for interpreting changes in PCIs.
The Price-Cap RTE Dataset (PCRD) includes RTEs from 1992 to 2009. The filings are from the annual access filing (about mid-June of filing year). Some carriers filed revisions to annual filings, and in earlier years some annual filings could not be located. The specific filings included in the PCRD were chosen on the basis of the most accurate and complete representation of annual filing data. Thus if revisions were made, and the revised filing was available, that filing was chosen for inclusion. If an annual filing could not be located, the available filing closest to an annual filing was sought. See the filing dates in Table 1 for identification of specific filings included in the PCRD.
The PCRD includes some filings for thirteen historical ILEC serving areas. The PCRD includes RTEs for the all the original Regional Bell Operation Company (RBOC) services areas. Company serving areas (cosa’s) covered are described in Tables 1 and 2 below. Note that coverage for filing years 1992 and 1993 is significantly less than for filing years 1994-2009. Imputations are thus necessary to construct aggregations for 1992-1993 that are consistent with those for 1994-2009. The historical construction of the New Bell Atlantic (BNTR) and then Verizon (VZTC) combined the Bell Atlantic, Nynex, and GTE serving areas included in the PCRD. The Verizon filings for 2006-2009 include GTE serving areas not previously in the PCRD. In 2007, 14% of Verizon switched access lines were in GTE serving areas not previously included in serving areas in the PCRD. These additional lines amount to 5% of switched access lines covered by the PCRD in 2007.
The PCRD covers a substantial share of U.S. switched access lines. The PCRD includes ILEC serving areas with 90% and 86% of switched access lines subject to price-cap regulation in 1994 and 2007, respectively. It includes ILEC serving areas with 80% and 64% of all U.S. switched access (both price-cap regulated and rate-of-return regulated lines) in 1994 and 2007, respectively. The underlying data and calculations for these figures are documented in the online PCRD coverage workbook (also Excel version ). Lines included in the PCRD are not, however, a representative sample of U.S. switched access lines. The PCRD mainly includes lines from large ILECs. Smaller ILECs and competitive LECs have significantly different regulation and rate structures than do large ILECs.
Demand and rate fields exist only for TRP categories that encompass only one rate element. In same cases, the reported revenue is not the same as revenue calculated from the reported rate and demand figures. In the PCRD, 41 lines have a revenue inconsistency greater than $100. For details, see the revenue inconsistency spreadsheet (here as an Excel file). The largest revenue inconsistency is about $2.7 million. A possible source of these inconsistencies is reporting demand and rates with less precision than was used in calculating the reported revenue.
|
Table 1 LEC Serving Areas included in the Price-Cap RTE Dataset (filings available per COSA per year)
| |||||||||
|
|
COSA (company serving area code) | ||||||||
|
year |
AMTR |
BATR |
BNTR |
BSTR |
CBTC |
CSTR |
GTCA |
GTFL |
GTTX |
|
1992 |
|
1 |
|
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1993 |
2 |
1 |
|
2 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
1994 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1995 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1996 |
2 |
1 |
|
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1997 |
2 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
|
2 |
2 |
2 |
|
1998 |
2 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1999 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2000 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2001 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2002 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2003 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2004 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2005 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2006 |
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
2007 |
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
2008 |
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
2009 |
1 |
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
Table 1 (continued)
| |||||||
|
year |
NXTR |
PTCA |
PTNV |
SNCT |
SWTR |
USTR |
VZTC |
|
1992 |
1 |
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
1993 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
1 |
1 |
|
|
1994 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
1995 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
1996 |
1 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
|
|
1997 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
1998 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
|
|
1999 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2000 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2001 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2002 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2003 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2004 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2005 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
2006 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2007 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2008 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
2009 |
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
Table 2 COSA Code Descriptions
| |
|
cosa |
company |
|
AMTR |
Ameritech |
|
BATR |
historic Bell Atlantic |
|
BNTR |
new Bell Atlantic |
|
BSTR |
Bell South |
|
CBTC |
Cincinnati Bell |
|
CSTR |
COSA associated with US West, 2000-1 |
|
GTCA |
GTE California |
|
GTFL |
GTE Florida |
|
GTTX |
GTE Texas |
|
NXTR |
Nynex |
|
PTCA |
Pacific Bell - California |
|
PTNV |
Pacific Bell - Nevada |
|
SNCT |
Southern New England Telephone |
|
SWTR |
Southwestern Bell |
|
USTR |
US West (now Qwest) |
|
VZTC |
Verizon |
|
For fuller descriptions of cosa’s see, http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/armis/carrier_filing_history/ | |
Summary data calculated from the PCRD are available in a spreadsheet entitled “interstate voice access data, 1992-2009”.
PCRD Technical Description
The PCRD table "rte 1992-2009 v3.txt" contains the RTE data lines for all cosa’s. Descriptive, non-data lines from the RTEs have been preserved where consistent with field definitions, i.e. text fields. Selecting on a year / cosa and sorting on line number (ln) will place these descriptive records in source-order relative to the data records. The table “template v3.txt” describes the standardized TRP across years. The template table is used to add or modify descriptive category fields in the rte table. To update the rte table with different template entries, join the rte table to the template table using the lcode field. Filter records by rte year field falling within year-s and year-e in the template table. The template table can be easily updated to accommodate additional years’ data appended to the rte table by incrementing year-e fields of 2009, and making whatever additional changes are appropriate. Not dynamically joining the rte and template tables allow queries to run faster and the rte table to be analyzed independently from the template table.
Note that the use of subtotal lines is ad hoc in the RTEs. Hence care must be exercised in summing categories to compute aggregates. Some categories include total lines (as well as index lines). The template table should be inspected to determine how to get aggregates.
Multiple TRP filings are included for some cosa’s for some years. The filing date field, and, where necessary the version field, differentiate between multiple filings. The field yrf (year reference filing) picks out specific filings to be considered for trend analysis. The field can be switched on and off for different filings to include different filings in the trend analysis. The Bell Atlantic (BATR) and Nynex (NXTR) filings were subsumed in the new Bell Atlantic (BNTR) and then Verizon (VZTC), which also incorporated the GTE companies. Consistent trend analysis should exclude BATR and NXTR in aggregates if BNTR is included.
Descriptive fields added to the RTE data records are basket, cat1 to cat3, zone, and band. These descriptive fields follow directly from the standardized specification of the RTE data lines (lname and associated FCC TRP definitions). The fields cat1 to cat3 use abbreviations similar to those used in the bandwidth demand and prices datasets. See the descriptions for those datasets to better understand abbreviations used in cat1-3. The field cat3 includes tags differentiating between premium services (services that provide Feature Group D equal access to presubscribed interstate interexchange carriers) and non-premium services (which do not support equal access). Tags in cat2 differentiate local switching (tagged in cat1) between LS1 (Feature Group A and B service) and LS2 (Feature Group C and D service). Premium, LS2 services predominate in minutes of use for cosa’s included in the PCRD. Codes for “total” occur in cat1, cat2, and cat3. The field containing the total code depends on the position of the total line in the aggregation hierarchy. The same is true for index codes API, PCI, SBI, upper SBI, and lower SBI. The template table should be consulted to understand how to select appropriately on cat fields to get consistent data across years.
Note that
demand and rate fields are blank for data lines that encompass more than one
rate element. Demand and rates for all rate elements are listed in
unstructured rate detail files.
|
Table 3 Field Descriptions for RTE Table
| |
|
field |
description |
|
cosa |
company study area code |
|
year |
filing year |
|
date |
filing date |
|
yrf |
indicates year reference filing (“y”) for selecting year-trend analysis |
|
version |
differentiates among alternate filings with the same cosa, year, and date |
|
ln |
source record sequence number (includes non-integers for corrections/insertions) |
|
lcode |
standardized TRP data line numbers (some changes across years); includes some descriptive text for non-data lines |
|
lname |
TRP line description text |
|
basket |
price cap basket name |
|
cat1 |
cat1-3 categorize data lines (see above) |
|
cat2 |
|
|
cat3 |
|
|
zone |
service zone (inc. "nz" and "all") |
|
band |
service band (used only in 1992-1993) |
|
demand |
monthly demand units for the previous calendar year (base year) |
|
lrate |
rate at last update of the PCI |
|
crate |
current rate |
|
prate |
proposed rate |
|
lrev |
revenue calculated as lrate times demand (as defined in previous fields) |
|
crev |
revenue calculated as crate times demand |
|
prev |
revenue calculated as prate times demand |
|
index |
field containing PCI, API, and SBI indices and bands, according to line specification |
|
Table 4 Field Descriptions for Template Table
| |
|
field |
description |
|
ln |
line sequence number (most useful in conjunction with selection of records with a common start year) |
|
year-s |
filing year the standardized data line entered the TRP |
|
year-e |
last filing year the standardized data line was in the TRP |
|
lcode |
standardized data line code (used in match to data lines in RTE table) |
|
lname |
line description from the TRP (some variants across years) |
|
basket |
price cap basket to which the line belongs |
|
cat1 |
cat1-cat3 are descriptive tags for the line |
|
cat2 |
|
|
cat3 |
|
|
zone |
service zone associated with the line |
|
band |
band associated with the line |
The TRP archive contains the original source files used to make the PCRD as well as all other available TRPs filed for price-cap local telephone companies in the specified years. These original sources are Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets in .wk3 and .wk4 formats. The source files are grouped by year. These years represents the filing years for the associated source files. Typically, the main annual filing is made about June 15 of a given year. However, filings also include preliminary annual access filings, revisions to the annual access files, special filings of various sorts, and filings not part of the annual access filing. These source files allow for a reconstruction of the PCRD. They also provide the material for the construction of a more comprehensive dataset.
Identifying files within years depends on file names, file dates, and header information within files. For source files in yearly TRP collections prior to 2007 and rate detail collections prior to 2003, file names are typically derived from COSA (COmpany Service Area) codes. For annual filings, the COSA code is typically followed by the letters "AN" and then an indication of the year (e.g. 95 indicating 1995). Additional filings often have a named formed from the COSA code followed by digits indicating the specific filing date, e.g. "6160" indicating a filing data of June 16, 2000 (month 6, day 16, year 0), or "7074" indicating July 7, 1994 (month 7, day 07, year 4). Alternative versions of a filing are sometimes indicated with a "-b" or "-c". This naming convention is used when two files with different file dates originally had the same name in the source collections. For rate detail filings, the file name and the file modify date often are the only direct information available for identifying a filing. TRPs, however, have in spreadsheet area A1:G4 specific filing identification information.
Source files names in TRP collections for years 2007 and later and rate detail collections for 2003 and later are much less systematic. Moreover, file creation/modification dates provide no relevant information. The source filings include all spreadsheet filings on ETFS in June and July for years from 2007 and from 2003 for TRPs and rate detail filings, respectively. For these filings, file names have been derived from the description field in the ETFS filing metadata. For TRPs, spreadsheet area A1:G4 continues to provide specific filing identification information. Rate detail files typically show some consistency in naming patterns (and the number of files in a multi-file filing) across years.
The TRP source archive includes several supplementary directories. It includes an alternate set of year collections for the years from 2003 to 2006. This alternative set is possibly useful in the case of a missing filing in the main collection. In almost all cases these alt year directories can be ignored. The TRP source archive also includes a "usw converted" directory. This contains US West TRPs converted to Excel format. It thus provides for each year a sample filing converted to Excel format. Because the original filing is retained in its year directory, the "usw converted" directory is not relevant to a comprehensive conversion of all the original source files.
[1] ILECs subject to rate review have filed standardized TRPs since just after the AT&T divestiture. See, e.g. Commission Requirements for Cost Support Material To Be Filed with Access Tariffs on October 3, 1986, Mimeo No. 6356, released Aug. 15, 1986 (1987 TRP Order); Commission Requirements for Cost Support Material To Be Filed with 1988 Annual Access Tariffs, Mimeo No. 4219, released July 30, 1987 (1988 TRP Order).