WASHINGTON-At least one member of the California Public Utilities Commission is still resisting efforts to split the Beverly Hills area code even as the Federal Communications Commission is auditing T-Mobile USA Inc.’s use of numbers there.
“The CPUC has requested that a `for cause’ audit of T-Mobile be performed. A `for cause’ audit may be requested by a state commission if that commission has reason to believe that a service provider may have violated the FCC’s rules or orders or applicable industry guidelines. Therefore, this audit is being conducted to determine T-Mobile’s compliance with the commission’s numbering rules and certain industry numbering guidelines,” said Hugh Boyle, chief auditor in the investigations and hearings division of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, in a letter to Anna Miller, T-Mobile director of numbering policy.
T-Mobile must answer more than a dozen questions regarding its use of numbers by May 28.
“T-Mobile has always tried to work with the CPUC and will continue to work with the CPUC because T-Mobile shares the CPUC’s goals of ensuring numbering resources are used efficiently,” said a T-Mobile representative.
The CPUC requested the audit last year. “T-Mobile has refused to return uncontaminated thousand-blocks exceeding the six-month time frame on which a carrier must activate a thousand-block by assigning at least one telephone number within the thousand-block to an end user. T-Mobile contaminated thousand-blocks even though it had not achieved at least a 75-percent fill rate in previously opened thousand-blocks within the same rate center,” charged John Leutza, CPUC director of the telecommunications division.
“We do not profit from having unused numbers, but T-Mobile, like all carriers, needs to have numbers to serve customer demand,” said T-Mobile.
Meanwhile, last week, the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, NeuStar Inc., projected that 310, the Beverly Hills area code, would run out of phone numbers-or “exhaust” in number-speak-by the end of the year.
This is not the first time that 310, which covers Beverly Hills and Los Angeles International Airport, among other places, has been projected to exhaust, said Cheryl Cox, deputy chief of staff to CPUC Commissioner Loretta Lynch.
“Back in the late 1990s, the area code was projected to split in 1998, and yet, the area code is still alive six years later,” said Cox.
Lynch has been a strong and consistent opponent of splitting 310 and said that an area-code overlay, which would require 10-digit dialing, would harm first responders, hospitals and the elderly because the elderly have a harder time with 10-digit phone numbers, and phone systems have been developed for seven digits.
“I was surprised frankly to find that unlikely set of allies in county sheriffs, hospitals and emergency personnel,” Lynch told RCR Wireless News.
The FCC last year gave the CPUC permission to require carriers to turn back unused numbers more frequently in the 310 and 909 area codes, but not statewide. The CPUC had requested raising the contamination level from 10 percent to 25 percent, which would have required carriers to give back more phone numbers so they could be made available to other carriers. The FCC said the California PUC had not shown it was necessary to raise the contamination levels statewide.
Before the FCC’s ruling, 10 percent of the numbers in an exchange had to be used for a carrier to keep the entire 10,000 numbers allocated to that exchange. California now requires carriers in the 310 and 909 area codes to give back numbers in an exchange if between 10 percent and 25 percent have been used.
