WASHINGTON-Sprint PCS late Friday was expected to file a lawsuit in a California federal court, claiming the California Public Utilities Commission is violating federal law by not assigning it more telephone numbers in Beverly Hills, Calif.
“If Sprint PCS does not immediately obtain numbers in Beverly Hills, it will exhaust its current supply of numbers and will be unable to provide services that the public has deemed valuable because it will have no Beverly Hills numbers to assign to new Beverly Hills customers,” said the company.
Sprint expects to run out of numbers on or about Aug. 14. It takes 45 days for carriers to program telephone numbers so Sprint believes it must obtain access to additional numbers immediately or it will not be able to offer service in Beverly Hills.
The CPUC has told Sprint to use numbers for Santa Monica for its Beverly Hills customers, the company said in a draft of the lawsuit obtained by RCR.
That is not possible, Sprint says, because callers from Beverly Hills pay a toll charge to call Santa Monica and vice versa. Customers do not want people calling them to incur a toll charge so they will choose another provider that is not experiencing a number crunch.
There are five commercial wireless carriers serving Beverly Hills.
Numbers are assigned according to the North American Numbering Plan. In the NANP, each customer is given a 10-digit number. The first three digits are the area code-in this case 310. The second three numbers indicate the rate center. There are 16 rate centers in the 310 area code. Each rate center (or NXX code) has a total of 10,000 numbers. The last four digits are the subscriber identifying number.
The Federal Communications Commission has exclusive authority over number allocations, but has delegated that authority to the states. Last year California asked for and received additional authority to conserve numbers. Indeed, California’s rationing efforts were praised by some members of the North American Numbering Council last month as a way to extend the life of the current telephone numbering system.
As part of its conservation plan, the CPUC has made it more difficult for carriers to obtain numbers. The FCC said, however, when it delegated the additional authority that the CPUC could not prevent a carrier that needed numbers from obtaining them. And, yet, according to Sprint, that is exactly what the CPUC is doing.
The CPUC was not able to respond before RCR’s deadline.
Sprint has asked the FCC to step in, but to no avail.
“This is a ridiculous set of events where a company has to go to court because the FCC has refused to enforce its own rules. The FCC’s failure to enforce its own rules strikes at the very heart of its efforts to create a competitive environment,” said Brian Fontes, senior vice president for policy and administration for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
The FCC was not available for comment at press time.
