INCOMPAS Celebrates Charter/TWC Interconnection Condition

The seven-year settlement-free peering condition FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to impose on the Charter/Time Warner Cable deal was being celebrated by INCOMPAS.

Charter had already volunteered the condition, but the FCC will make it an ironclad seven-year hitch.

That works for INCOMPAS, whose members comprise competitive telecoms and edge providers, including Netflix, Google, Amazon and Level Three.

Related: FCC Proposes Charter-Time Warner Cable Merger Conditions

INCOMPAS called the condition an unconditional victory for interconnection.

"Interconnection is the first amendment of competition policy, and we are please[d] that Chairman Wheeler has justified it as such in his conditional approval of the merger.”

In comments on the deal, with which it had issues, INCOMPAS had requested the interconnection condition, and at seven years, rather than the three Charter had proposed.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.