WASHINGTON-Wireline telecommunications carriers are gearing up to offer two phases of number portability this year, after successfully winning a time extension from the Federal Communications Commission. Some in the wireless industry would like the same to happen.
Wireless number portability is scheduled to begin June 30, 1999. Some carriers have rallied behind a December Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association petition to move that date to March 31, 2000, a nine-month reprieve.
In 1996, when the commission released its first report and order on number portability, the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau was given the authority to delay wireless implementation of this feature for up to nine months, if need be. CTIA and other wireless concerns are asking the bureau to do just that, citing unadopted and undeveloped standards. CTIA also pointed out that many wireless companies still are in the nascent stage and cannot commit dollars to an as-yet-limited-use technology.
Agreeing with the association was 3607 Communications Co., which cited the ongoing problems surrounding how to separate a wireless carrier’s mobile identification number from its mobile directory number-a problem in many wireless technologies. Standards for making the separation to facilitate number portability probably will not be voted on until May, and then they must be tested before carriers’ systems can be redesigned to include number portability. Testing can take up to two years, 3607 said.
Taking the issue a step further was AirTouch Communications Inc., which wants the commission to “reconsider the entire implementation scheme for wireless number portability at a minimum to better align the dates with marketplace realities.” AirTouch presented the manufacturers’ point of view on timing, saying that vendors of commercial mobile radio services switches, for example, first would have to test a new system on one customer to work out the bugs. Then the new application would be tested in specific markets as carriers test any needed modifications in the back office. Then each system must be modified and redesigned to perform all the facets of the new application. Number portability, AirTouch said, touches on a carrier’s ordering, provisioning, customer care, call center, sales automation, toll rating, collections, inventory, maintenance, repair, reseller activation, billing and roaming systems.
AirTouch also mentioned that CMRS carriers must address technical aspects of number portability that wireline carriers do not. “For example, landline number portability need not be installed in Los Angeles for number portability to work successfully in Chicago,” it wrote. “Moreover, in landline networks, number portability need not be deployed ubiquitously within a given area. Indeed, the commission has required landline carriers to convert only those switches within the 100 most populous metropolitan statistical areas which are subject to a specific request for conversion.” On the other hand, CMRS providers need to support a national number-portability program because of roaming.
E911 compatibility will be affected by number portability, said Sprint Spectrum L.P., and such a system cannot be implemented until standards and testing take place. Public-safety dispatchers will not be able to return a call to a wireless subscriber until all the problems with splitting the MIN and MDN can be solved, an unlikely event before June 30, 1999. In addition, new carriers are spending so much capital building out their networks that a mandate to install number portability before a suitable solution has been tested “would be … very wasteful, hindering new entrants’ ability to compete and deploy their systems.”
Joint comments of Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems and Pacific Bell Mobile Systems, while agreeing with CTIA and other commenters, noted that the nine-month extension still may not be enough time to implement a workable number-portability system.
Cellular and PCS providers are not the only operators affected by number portability. The American Mobile Telecommunications Association, representing the specialized mobile radio industry, asked the commission to “modify its number-portability obligations to apply the definition of `covered SMR’ recently adopted in the E911 proceeding … The vast majority of SMR operators included within the covered SMR provider definition in respect to this obligation were not intended by the FCC to be subject to the number-portability requirements and are incapable of meeting them.”
A number of commenters believe the implementation deadlines should stay in place. PCS provider Omnipoint contended that “CTIA does not speak” for it, and that it fully expects to comply with the FCC’s deadline on this issue. Omnipoint’s GSM technology does not have to split MINs and MDNs, so that time problem is nonexistent. WorldCom Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. long-distance carrier and an LEC, also opposed CTIA’s petition, writing that while it understands the pressures of getting a new network up and running, “the CTIA petition raises far more questions than it actually answers and certainly does not overcome the commission’s own express findings in this proceeding that wireless number portability should be implemented as quickly as possible.” WorldCom charged the wireless industry with only limited participation in the development of number portability; the company also wrote that there is no guarantee that an additional nine months would solve all the standards problems and that the cost of building out a new network is something with which all carriers have had to juggle. WorldCom also is concerned that wireless carriers may be shirking their responsibility for some number-portability costs.
“WorldCom has no desire to continue paying more than its fair share in order to subsidize network construction,” it wrote. “Lest the industry forget, the Telecommunications Act mandated all carriers to contribute, not just new entrants or local competitors or carriers in densely populated areas or wireline carriers for that matter …WorldCom and several other wireline carriers are shouldering the entire financial burden of implementing local number portability.”
