WASHINGTON-Wireless carriers that still oppose wireless local number portability are trying another last-ditch effort to stop the mandate.
The Senate Appropriations Committee last Thursday sent to the Senate floor a bill that directs the Federal Communications Commission to release the implementation guidelines for WLNP before the Nov. 24 deadline.
“The committee is pleased that the FCC is developing implementation requirements for local number portability. The committee urges the FCC to complete these requirements prior to the implementation deadline and to address wireline-to-wireless portability in a timely manner,” according to the report, which accompanies the FCC funding bill.
In addition, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association was expected last Friday to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to force the FCC to release the implementation rules or to delay the Nov. 24 mandate.
“The FCC’s own failure to exercise a meaningful role in WLNP, beyond imposing a deadline of its own making, its failure to issue guidance despite industry impasse and urgent North American Numbering Council submissions, and its failure to ensure uniform standards for wireless portability (as it did for wireline portability), have created an unstable environment that threatens the underlying competition purpose of LNP itself. Until the FCC decides these implementation issues, all of which are pending before the commission, carriers will not be able to resolve these issues on their own. And absent such resolution, carriers will not be able to implement LNP,” wrote CTIA in a draft of the filing.
While CTIA is leading the efforts to delay WLNP, its largest member-Verizon Wireless-in June dropped out of the battle.
Even though the appropriations report language does not tell the FCC to delay the WLNP mandate, the wireless industry sees this as a foot in the door. If the FCC doesn’t act and Congress doesn’t finish action on the FCC funding bill, formally referred to as the Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2004, before November-which is likely-the industry can go back to Congress and ask to strengthen the language.
“We need a roadmap, or we can’t implement WLNP,” said Steven Berry, CTIA senior vice president for governmental affairs.
State regulators, on the other hand, were thrilled at being able to turn back an effort to require the FCC to delay WLNP until it had issued rules on wireless-to-wireline portability.
“While we have won yet another critical battle in Congress, state regulators across the country are still keenly aware that we have yet to win the war,” said Jessica Zufolo, legislative director for the National Association for Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which represents state regulators.
For its part, the FCC would not commit to any deadline. The agency already missed CTIA’s Sept. 1 deadline for implementation guidelines.
“We have no comment on pending legislation. Wireless carriers have had sufficient time to prepare for the commission’s Nov. 24 deadline. At the FCC, we’re working to ensure there is a clear process in place for consumers and plan to address any remaining relevant issues in the near future,” said Meribeth McCarrick, spokeswoman for the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
Part of the delay in getting implementation rules out the door may be the constant lobbying. For example, last Thursday representatives from rural carriers met with FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein to stress their views, which differ from CTIA’s.
Rural carriers are more aligned with wireline carriers in the WLNP implementation battle. For example, the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telephone Companies reported that the group told Copps and Adelstein that “a carrier who requests porting within another carrier’s rate center must have its own numbering resources within that rate center, so that both carriers have the potential to win customers from each other.”
A rate center is a geographic location around a switching center used by state regulators to set local rates. In other words, if a person moves from one side of a city to another, that person must change his telephone number. Large wireless carriers generally do not use rate centers, but smaller rural wireless carriers might because they may only be located in one rate center.
