FCC Widens Phone Access to Commercial, Residential Units

Seeking to boost telephone competition, federal regulators Thursday approved rules granting phone carriers greater access to commercial and residential buildings.

In a 4-1 vote, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to bar phone companies such as Pacific Bell parent SBC Communications Inc. from making exclusive deals with commercial building owners that restricted landlords from granting building access to other telecommunications companies. The new rules also require incumbent phone companies and other utilities to share on-premise facilities with smaller carriers.

FCC Chairman William E. Kennard said the agency’s new rules will give building tenants “real choice in their telecommunications services. . . . Access to the last 100 feet [of wiring] is one of the last remaining barriers to complete end-to-end competition for telecommunications services.”

Upstart telecommunications companies such as Teligent of Vienna, Va., and New York-based Winstar Communications Inc. had complained that they had access to fewer than 5% of the nation’s estimated 760,000 commercial office buildings because incumbent phone companies have secured exclusive contracts with most landlords.

But in moving to improve tenants’ access to advanced communications services, the FCC put itself on a collision course with landlords who say the agency is trying to exert control over property and contract matters usually decided by building owners.

“We don’t think that there are many of these exclusive agreements in the commercial context. . . . It’s bad business,” said Roger Platt, head of the Real Estate Roundtable, an industry trade group. While Platt praised the FCC for exercising “some restraint” in its new rules, he said his group may expand an existing lawsuit it has against the FCC in order to block some of the agency’s new regulations.

The five-member FCC adopted the new rules just before its public meeting. The full details of the new regulations were still being worked out and will not be released for several days.

In addition to barring exclusive contracts and more access to communications wiring and facilities inside commercial and apartment buildings, the FCC also granted commercial and residential tenants the right to place satellite dishes as large as a bicycle wheel on a balcony or other area they occupy to receive data transmissions from providers such as Sprint Corp.

The rules are potentially at odds with homeowner associations that restrict the placement of outdoor communications antennas on aesthetic grounds.

A previous FCC rule had barred landlords and homeowner groups from preventing the installation of similar dishes for video services, but Thursday’s ruling extends the umbrella of protection to data services as well.