Hesse calls for FCC to change access rules

October 13, 2009

Calling the nation’s wireless regulatory system “grounded in the past,” Sprint Nextel’s President and CEO Dan Hesse said he is hopeful the new Federal Communications Commission will update regulations and rethink current special access regimes.

Hesse said incumbent carriers are squeezing competitors with high fees for connecting to their infrastructures, saying that AT&T and Verizon, for example, are receiving more than $8 billion per year in the access fees competitors must pay.

He pointed out that within the next couple of years, the wireless industry will become more important to the U.S. economy than the auto industry, making FCC action especially imperative to encourage continued growth in it.

In fact, Hesse said, wireless will become one of only five “trillion dollar” businesses in the United States. The others include the military, automobile, tourism and food service.

Casual and soft-spoken, Hesse enumerated a number of Sprint Nextel accomplishment during recent years, and spoke of the Sprint Partner Interexchange Network, or PIN, which the company introduced this week at COMPTEL PLUS.

The offering is a low-cost transit solution to terminate to other on-net partners and to off-net PSTN numbers.

Hesse also said that Sprint is working hard to capitalize on potential in the machine-to-machine wireless market, which he said could grow 250 percent by 2013. He said Sprint already has more than 300 apps for the machine-to-machine technologies, which could result in major changes in the way businesses do business.