Agenda - 05-03-2005-5j - Laserfiche WebLink

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-5 -12- The Commission also clarifies that plant in service must be allocated beriveen regulated and unregulated services based on a reasonable measure of the current usage of that plant,24 ... Accordingly, for our final rules, we will make this point explicit and will amend the interim rule to specify that tangible plant must be used and useful in the provision of regulated cable services in order to be included in the rate base. This will ensure that the rate base for regulated cable service only includes plant used for such regulated cable service, and that subscribers to regulated tiers are not forced to subsidize plant that is used solely for premium services.'S In addition, we recognize that what constitutes a reasonable measure of current usage of the tangible plant depends on the circumstances, We believe that in many cases a reasonable measure would be a straight channel ratio, In other words, if any operator provides programming over a total of 40 channels, 32 of which aze BST and CPST channels and eight of which are premium and pay-per-view channels, the operator must allocate 80% of its plant to regulated cable service and 20% to unregulated service.'-6 TWC proposes to continue to charge the same $1.81 for NC-0276a, $2.,11 for NC-0276b, and $1.45 for NC-0256 monthly fee set five yeazs earlier on form 12.35 to recover Network Upgrade costs, The "upgrade" chazge is added to the BST-MPR to create the combined Maximum Permitted BST regulated rate (See Table 2). Cable operators, such as TWC, believe that once the initial rate is set, it never changes nor is ever adjusted, for example, to reflect customer growth during the intervening 5-years.. There is nothing in the FCC's cost of service rules, rulemakings, or the 1235 instructions, which state that the form 1235 is filed "only once" and that the "add-on" rate calculated at that point in time continues in perpetuity. In fact, such action conttadicts the FCC's general cost of service rules which proceed on the basis of annualized revenues and expenses and require revaluations for accumulated depreciation, The "only" item which is filed once is the final cost of the upgrade. The FCC's cost of service rules require that this capital expense become the starting point for the recovery of these costs, and that going forwazd the factors which vary include the proportion of cable system bandwidth used for regulated and unregulated services, and the customer count, The principle underlying the cost of service rules is to ensure that regulated cable service zald at ¶37. zs~d '-bld a! ¶38