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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 142 / Wednesday, July 28, 2021 / Rules and Regulations
inmate calls by purchasing access to third-party databases that classify them as intrastate, interstate, or international and that these databases do not provide the actual geographical location associated with a particular device or service. Relatedly, Securus explains that these third parties use telephone numbers or, since the advent of local number portability, the Local Routing Number . . . as a proxy for . . .
jurisdiction, and lack the information needed to apply the end-to-end analysis. The Local Routing Number is a telephone number assigned in the local number portability database for the purposes of routing a call to a telephone number that has been ported. When a call is made to a number that has been ported, the routing path for the call is established based on the Local Routing Number rather than on the dialed number. GTL concludes that given indicia that classification determinations have, for decades, been under the control of entities over which many providers exercise no authority, critical logistical and financial questions present themselves, such as the costs attendant upon inmate calling services providers should they be required to design, deploy, and implement an alternative call classification system.
43. The Commission finds these arguments unpersuasive. The Commissions rules specify that providers of inmate calling services are currently prohibited from charging more than $0.21 per minute for interstate Debit Calling, Prepaid Calling, or Prepaid Collect Calling and prior to todays accompanying Report and Order more than $0.25 per minute for interstate Collect Calling. The current rule language tracks the language adopted in 2013 but adds the term interstate. The term interstate was added to section 64.6030 of the Commissions rules as a non-substantive change to reflect a D.C. Circuit decision that the Commissions regulation of inmate calling services rates could extend no further than the extent of its authority over interstate and international calls. The fact that the addition of interstate was a nonsubstantive change to reflect a court decision limiting the Commissions inmate calling services rate regulations to the limit of the Commissions authority further reinforces the reasonableness of interpreting interstate consistent with the Commissions historical jurisdictional approach. The Commissions interpretation of the term interstate in its rule accords not only with the use of that terminology in the Communications
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Act, but also with the Commissions traditional approach to defining jurisdiction. It is the providers responsibility to appropriately comply with this most basic regulatory obligation of telecommunications service providers with respect to their customersdetermining the proper jurisdiction of a call when charging its customers the correct and lawful rates for those calls using the end-to-end analysis. Providers did not express any concerns about their ability to determine the jurisdiction of any given call when the Commissions adopted interim rate caps . . . for interstate inmate calling services in 2013. Nor did they express such concerns in the following years, as those interim rate caps continued to apply. Indeed, despite GTLs claims here, it and other providers use the Commissions historical approach when defining the terms interstate and intrastate in at least some of their tariffs and price lists.
It is unclear why GTL, or any provider, would base its rates on the geographic locations of the parties to a call if the service provider could not, in fact, determine where the parties are located at the time of the call. The record also provides no indication that the third parties upon which GTL and others claim they rely for determining the jurisdiction of their calls could not accurately determine whether a consumer is making calls between NPANXX codes assigned to wireline, wireless, or nomadic VoIP numbers to determine whether those calls are subject to the Commissions interstate rate caps without relying on another methodology to determine the actual endpoints of the call.
44. Further, many of the guides and brochures to which GTL cites in this regard relate predominantly to call routing rather than rating. For example, GTL cites to the iconectiv brochure Route It Right Every Time with LERG
OnLine. That brochure contains precisely two references to rating, neither of which relate to the billing of end-user customers. GTL also points to an iconectiv Catalog of Products and Services, but that document is similarly unhelpful for GTL. Finally, the iconectiv catalog to which GTL cites notes that the Telecom Routing Administrations products are a mainstay in supporting the various offerings of service providers . . . and, bottom line, in ensuring calls placed by their customers and through their network complete without any problems. In other words, the Telecom Routing Administration provides data that supports the routing of calls.

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Nowhere in that catalog does it state that providers should rely solely on NPANXX codes for rating calls to end users. The Commission also disagrees with GTLs characterization of the Local Exchange Routing Guide as requiring the use of NPANXXs for determining the jurisdictional nature of a call. Once again, GTL conflates the relationship of an NPANXX code to that codes original rate center designation, reflected in the Local Exchange Routing Guide for routing purposes, with using the same rate center information to determine whether the terminating call to that NPANXX code is jurisdictionally intrastate or interstate.
The original rate center designation of an NPANXX number has no bearing on where calls to that number actually terminate when the called party is a customer of a wireless or nomadic VoIP
provider, at a minimum. But even if it did, that would have no bearing on inmate calling services providers obligations to charge incarcerated people and those whom they call lawful rates.
45. To the extent that the technical issues raised by GTL make it impracticable or impossible to determine whether a call is interstate or intrastate based on the geographical endpoints of the call, the Commission does not require providers of calling services for incarcerated people to redesign or deploy other call classification systems. Instead, the Commission reaffirms that providers must charge a rate at or below the applicable interstate cap for that call.
Pay Tel complains that todays Order effectively classifies all inmate calling services calls as jurisdictionally interstate. Pay Tel asserts that, as a consequence, consumers will face significant rate increases due to assessment of federal Universal Service Fund charges on all calls, in addition to a host of other concomitant consequences. The Commission finds such concerns misplaced. Under the Commissions end-to-end analysis, charges for a call that is jurisdictionally indeterminant may not exceed the applicable interim interstate rate cap, but where a state has a lower rate cap in place for intrastate calls, charges for a call of indeterminate nature must comply with the lower state rate cap.
The Commission also disagrees that there would necessarily be a significant impact on Universal Service Fund assessments as Pay Tel and Securus allege. First, the Commission does not reclassify any calls as interstate calls;
and second providers may continue to use whatever proxy or good faith
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