WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission has granted carrier AT&T Mobility a waiver related to voice-over-Wi-Fi calling as it applies to people with hearing problems.
The waiver is valid until Dec. 31, 2017. This comes following a complaint lodged last week by AT&T Mobility that competitors Sprint and T-Mobile US are using Wi-Fi calling that doesn’t conform to accessibility rules for those hard of hearing, specifically the FCC teletypewriter functionality, which enables text-based communication over a telephone call.
This whole issue began in June when, rather than offer TTY with its Wi-Fi calling, AT&T Mobility developed a service for the hard of hearing called Real Time Text or RTT. The company then filed the solution with the FCC to ask for a waiver. However, there was a six-week delay before the FCC issued its public notice that then initiated a 45-day comment period.
This delayed the rollout of AT&T Mobility’s Wi-Fi calling, even while Sprint and T-Mobile US went ahead with theirs without waivers. James Cicconi, SEVP of external and legislative affairs at AT&T, noted in his letter to the Commission: “I do not reference this delay to denigrate the Staff’s efforts here, but simply to observe that the processes for keeping pace with technology transitions at the Commission are slow, particularly here where coordination amongst three Bureaus/Departments is involved.” He went on to say, “Because the Commission has not granted waiver petition, we are not in a position to provide Wi-Fi calling services to our customers even while our competitors provide those services in defiance of the Commission’s rules.”
The FCC has noted in its statement that following the 45-day public comment period: “Commenters to this proceeding uniformly support the grant of AT&T’s request for a waiver, albeit some raise concerns about the effective period of the waiver. Consumer Groups point out that because of its limitations, TTY technology is now ‘sparsely used on IP networks’ by the deaf and hard of hearing community, and therefore, this community ‘is not served by rules mandating support of only TTY (without an option for RTT) on IP-based networks.’ ”
The FCC’s perceived sluggishness on this topic has raised some concerns that the commission’s procedures are being out-paced by technological advancement. This follows both Republican members of the commission questioning the FCC regulatory process.
