Section 378:17-a Local Telephone Calling Areas and Intrastate Access Charges.
I. In this section, ""local calling area'' means the area which may be called from a telephone calling exchange without paying toll charges or access charges.
II. If the commission uses a community of interest standard to limit requests to add additional exchanges to a local calling area, the commission should not reject requests solely because few calls are currently being made between the exchanges that would become local calls if the request were granted. If few calls are currently being made, the commission should consider the likelihood of significant increases in the number of calls between the exchanges if the request is granted and these calls become local calls, especially where public school district boundaries indicate that this is likely to occur.
III. (a) The commission should, as soon as possible after each significant decrease of interstate access charges by the federal government, consider corresponding reductions in intrastate access charges, taking into account both the disadvantages to customers of intrastate access charges that exceed interstate access charges and the disadvantages to customers of increases in charges for basic services.
(b) The commission should consider reducing intrastate access charges and increasing basic monthly service charges for local exchange carrier telephone utilities that have both a higher intrastate access charge than the state median intrastate access charge and a lower basic monthly service charge than the state median basic monthly service charge for exchanges with similar numbers of telephones within the local calling area.
Source. 2000, 33:2, eff. June 2, 2000.