Founded over 40 years ago, the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telephone Companies (OPASTCO) is focused on helping rural providers succeed.

by Jeff Goldman [February 7, 2007]

The Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telephone Companies (OPASTCO) was founded in 1963 and now represents more than 500 Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) serving over 2.5 million access lines. In terms of its focus, the organization's tag line, "leading the rural telecommunications future," says it all.

Steve Pastorkovich, OPASTCO's director of business development and senior policy analyst, says the organization's initial focus was on settlements, now called access charges. "It was about making sure that the smallest companies—which have the highest cost because of the sparse populations that they serve and the lack of economies of scale—were compensated in a manner that reflected their high costs," he says.

Since OPASTCO's founding, Pastorkovich says, the group has both grown significantly in membership and in scope. About a third of its members are now involved in wireless, over 90 percent are ISPs, and the majority of them offer broadband, whether over wireless, cable, DSL or fiber. "A little under a third also do CLEC operations," he says.

And while the group was initially composed only of small companies, that has inevitably changed. "Some of our companies are losing populations, but some are gaining," Pastorkovich says. "Some are in areas that 30 years ago were very rural and are now suburban, so we have a diversity of membership there—but our median average is about 6,500 access lines."

Keeping it small
OPASTCO's bylaws, Pastorkovich says, limit membership to companies with 100,000 access lines or fewer, unless the board finds that the company is in "sympathy and accord" with the group's aims. "A number of our founders went on to become bigger companies," he says. "So for instance we have TDS, which was a founding member—they have, I believe, over 600,000 access lines. There's a few companies that have more than 100,000, but they're very much the exception."

In addition, Pastorkovich says the dues are structured specifically to prevent the organization from becoming dependent on any single member's participation. While the dues structure may seem confusing at first, he says, "we've found that it's pretty fair, it works well, and it keeps the focus on the small companies while letting larger companies participate."

And no matter what a company pays, the benefits are the same for all members. The only difference, Pastorkovich notes, is that vendor members can pay for medallion membership, which provides vendor-focused benefits like ad space in OPASTCO's magazine and a quarterly electronic update of the membership list.

Regulation and education
OPASTCO's primary focus, Pastorkovich says, is on regulatory policy and member education. "We do a lot of FCC work, and we also have one person who works full time on Capitol Hill—and other people lend him a hand when needed—we send members to both bodies," he says. On the FCC side, the focus is on everything from traditional voice to broadband and IP, including VoIP and IPTV.

John McHugh, OPASTCO's technical director, says the organization's technical committee looks at all pending legislation and FCC notices to keep an eye out for any potential impact on smaller providers. The committee then delivers comments back to the FCC or to the members of Congress involved in legislation. "We make sure that the concerns of the small rural companies are represented at that point," he says.

The committee also publishes technical papers targeted to members' needs. "We've got a number of technical papers that are available to our members on almost any subject," McHugh says. "We wrote our VoIP paper in 1999—we like to think we're out there ahead of things to get the information out to our members companies."

Meetings and publications
In addition, McHugh says, the committee co-produces OPASTCO's annual technical symposium, which is held each fall. "We just did one on IPTV, we've done one on ISPs, we've done one on wireless, and the next one we're talking about doing in the fall is going to be on home networking," he says. There's also an annual conference and an annual trade show.

McHugh says the active technical side of OPASTCO can be a great benefit to its members. "The folks that join derive great benefit from the fact that they don't have to out and individually research this, or pay consulting engineering people to research it for them," he says. "They have a resource right within the organization to do that."

OPASTCO also produces a number of publications for its members, including the bi-monthly magazine Roundtable, a monthly opinion newsletter called the OPASTCO Advocate, the bi-weekly OPASTCO 411 newsletter with FCC and Capitol Hill news, and the weekly 'Just Browsing' newsletter specifically for ISPs.

OPASTCO's future
Looking ahead, Pastorkovich says OPASTCO's biggest challenge lies in finding the necessary funding for rural broadband access. "There needs to be some kind of support mechanism," he says. "Universal service has made voice service available to well over 90 percent of the population, and we believe that the same principles should be applied to broadband."

When a customer is 30 or 40 miles away from the nearest central office, McHugh says, that provides a unique challenge, and it's one that OPASTCO wants to help solve. "There are some real concerns about how we're going to get broadband, true broadband, to rural America so that the individual in rural Montana has the same opportunities as the individual sitting outside Los Angeles," he says.

— End

 

Related articles:
	[Sept. 14, 2006]	DSL Forum's New Direction
	[Aug. 21, 2006]	ISPs and RLECs Have Much in Common
	[June 29, 2005]	DSL Prime: Broadband Everywhere, Deployed Faster

Online resources:
	ISP-Planet Directory of ISP Associations