Fire Island Battle Forces Exam of Whether Wireless Equal to Traditional Phone Service, Officials Say

"A lot of the regulatory mindset, whether it’s from government, policymakers or folks in the think tank community, is still wireline-centric and that’s somewhat generational,” said former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. “Thirty or over, you might think of the telecom network as a wireline world and there are a lot of things associated with that. But I think there will be someday a new generation of policymakers who will understand that the wireless marketplaces actually offers the potential for a much more robust consumer experience.”

"The FCC doesn’t need to ask whether mobile wireless is a market substitute for plain old telephone service,” said Fred Campbell, director of the Communications Liberty & Innovation Project and former chief of the FCC Wireless Bureau. “It already knows there will soon be more wireless-only than wired telephone households. Given this fact, the FCC’s question is akin to asking whether the internal combustion engine is a substitute for the horse and buggy. Rather than spend its resources analyzing the minutiae of an outdated question, the FCC should be establishing a reasonable timeline and identifying the relevant principles for the transition to modern communications networks."

Fire Island will be a major early test for Tom Wheeler once he becomes FCC chairman, Campbell added. “Does he follow the staff’s horse-and-buggy approach and spend his time focusing on the relative merits of a car’s greater speed versus the fact that a slower horse can never run out of gas, or does he follow the vast majority of consumers who are rapidly adopting modern network technologies and putting the plain old telephone network out to pasture?"

FCC officials told us that the big advantage wireline has is location accuracy for 911 calls, and many 911 operators themselves keep a landline phone in their homes for emergencies.

Public Knowledge has led the charge against Verizon’s Fire Island proposal, but Senior Vice President Harold Feld said he’s “agnostic” on the advantages of wireless versus wireline. “There is a difference between when wireless is one alternative in the market and when this is all you have,” Feld said in an interview. “That’s the big problem with Fire Island. Every one of those Fire Island customers who is keeping a landline did so for a reason. It wasn’t because they like writing two checks and it wasn’t because they didn’t know that wireless was an option.”

Location accuracy with 911 isn’t the only issue, Feld said. “The fact is that if this is your only mode of communications then I would really hope that we would have some better standards for how [carriers] are going to harden that network, because there is no alternative if that tower goes down,” he said. “There are network reliability issues when this becomes the primary network. There are voice quality issues, which are really important. One of the biggest problems you have with wireless service is … you can have variable coverage depending on where you live. That’s just the nature of wireless."

Fire Island is “a distinct, unique situation,” countered Will Johnson, Verizon associate general counsel. “It’s not a proxy for the more general network transition.” VoiceLink was designed, he said, as an optional offering for customers with poor voice service on copper lines. It doesn’t really implicate the broader IP transition in general, he said.

"It’s clear there are some groups out there that are trying to advance their own regulatory agendas” by trying to make the Fire Island Section 214 petition a part of the IP transition discussion. But this is not the place,” he said. “There are FCC proceedings considering the more general transition,” he said. “The question is, are you going to require providers to continue to direct their resources toward older technologies,” he asked, “or are you going to allow them the flexibility to use newer technologies like wireless and IP networks that better meet the demands of their customers?"

"It’s basically a question about the future of telephony in the United States as mediated through a seemingly innocuous tiny island community,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. Verizon likes to portray it as simply an isolated question over whether rebuilding the copper is economically feasible, but that misses the main point, he said. This is about the common carriage, the obligations of Title II of the Communications Act, and decades of consumer protections that “would be jettisoned.”

If those protections are jettisoned, every foreign attachment mandate from Carterfone forward would cease to exist, Meinrath said. “You end up with a more fragile system that costs more and delivers worse quality,” he said. “Some things work extremely well, and copper is one of them.” With its independent line power, copper lines are far more reliable during a crisis. With the switch to IP and wireless systems, Meinrath said, “people will not be able to contact first responders, and will likely die."

Public interest lawyer Andrew Schwartzman said the FCC was on the right track to ask more questions about Verizon’s proposal for Fire Island. “Wireless only systems are surely on their way, but we need ground rules,” he said. “The commission and state agencies need to ensure that certain basic needs are met. For example, are there technological fixes for providing connectivity for faxes, medical alerts, alarm systems and credit card transactions? Should there be minimum requirements for electrical power outages? Verizon was ready to proceed without addressing these questions, and the commission has, quite properly, treated the Fire Island matter as one which raises fundamental questions that must be answered first."

Richard Bennett, senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said consumers are already “sold” on wireless and are cutting the cord. “The Australian National Broadband Network is going to use LTE for the 7 percent of the nation too expensive to reach with fiber. The only drawback of the Verizon Voice Link system, deployed in affluent areas affected by Sandy, is its inability to support modems, but modems are irrelevant when broadband LTE is deployed side-by-side with Voice Link. It’s too late in the game to string any more copper wire, so the FCC and the POTS sentimentalists need to get on the right side of history."

"I don’t want anybody to die as a result of the IP transition,” said Bob Quinn, AT&T senior vice president-federal regulatory. “Why aren’t you writing a story,” Quinn asked, about “all those people who are dying because they can’t get in touch with public safety anymore? You're not because it’s not happening.” To Quinn, who spends his days discussing charts that show 85 percent of people have adopted a technology other than twisted-pair POTS service, the transition has long been happening; Fire Island is just an extreme example of it. “On a fundamental level, Fire Island is about a flash cut transition from TDM technology to whatever the replacement for the technology is going to be in the future,” he said. “I have a lot of sympathy for the citizens of Fire Island who are forced to make this kind of a flash cut before any of the concerns and problems were able to be fleshed out.”

How the FCC responds to Verizon’s Section 214 application could have implications for the IP transition at large, Quinn said, and that’s why AT&T weighed in. “We're headed into hurricane season,” he said. “That could be me in the barrier islands of the Gulf Coast. But for the grace of God, that could be AT&T instead of Verizon. So I have sympathy.” Ultimately the FCC should find that wireless is an adequate substitute for wireline, he said. Many of the objections to Verizon’s application focus on fax machines and low-bit rate medical technology, Quinn said. But Quinn is convinced that if the commission approves trials like the ones AT&T has been pushing (CD Feb 22 p1), Silicon Valley types will say, “Here’s an opportunity to make something.” Surely someone could create a fax machine that works with the new technology, he said. “The problem with Fire Island is, it was a flash cut. There was no solution overnight. There was no transition."

A small carrier official questioned whether regulators are asking the right questions. “Wireless is a substitute technology and what they should be focusing on is getting the technology on Fire Island that is state-of-the-art wireless technology, that’s got better survivability in a storm like Sandy,” the official said. “We should be talking about IP connectivity. If you're going to an all-IP network, ensuring that there is connectivity … a Title II like requirement to connect to other networks, that’s really what they should be talking about.”

"I'm a firm believer that wireless is a very good substitute for wireline service, maybe not a 100 percent substitute, but a very good substitute,” said a former FCC chief of staff. Many subscribers prefer wireless to wireline, he said. “The bottom line is with wireless you can do more -- you can do voice, video and data,” the former official said. “Wireless service better serves the needs of consumers. Consumers vote, if you will, simply by their choice and I think their clear choice is wireless.”

"Everyone loves to say wireless is becoming a substitute for wireline,” said a former FCC spectrum official. “The tension is no one wants wireless to be regulated the way wireline is. It’s a very difficult balance.” Fire Island is not about the IP transition, the former official said. “This has to do with what is the most time effective, cost effective way to quickly provide service for people who live in an area destroyed by Hurricane Sandy."

"There’s nothing new about this debate,” said Phoenix Center President Lawrence Spiwak. “The debate that we're having is what is good enough, and what is the level of service that you expect,” he said. The commission’s analysis of Verizon’s wireless capacity doesn’t bode poorly for wireless as a substitute in general, he said. Millions of Americans with access to wireline have cut the cord. For them, “wireless seems to be perfectly adequate for what their needs are.” The real question, Spiwak said, is about what minimum level of service is part of the social contract. “Fire Island is accelerating that discussion."

"To dismiss outright one particular technology or platform as inadequate is wrong and counterproductive to the task at hand,” said Michael Santorelli, director of the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School. Santorelli encourages regulators to “err on the side of promoting innovation, not on preserving the status quo.” Ultimately, “these changes do not herald a doomsday for consumers,” but are rather “an opportunity for stakeholders to work together toward ensuring that as many people as possible are included in this next step in the evolution of communications in this country."

"None of the technologies are a perfect substitute for every customer or application,” said Joe Gillan, president of Gillan Associates. “The wireline network supports more than your grandmother’s dial tone. … Verizon rolled out a lowest not-common denominator service and exposed the core problem of all these transitions: What do you do with special-purpose circuits and services?” AT&T’s Project Velocity IP, which would invest $14 billion on fiber and wireless buildout, raises an even larger question, he said. “Having taken subsidy for decades that was based on the cost to rebuild the wireline network, now that is actually time for reinvestment, why aren’t they being questioned about where the subsidy went? It was never based on the cost of recovering prior investment -- it was based on a promise that the network would be replaced as it aged. But now they want to walk away."

"Fire Island seems to be a somewhat unique situation, with the challenges arguably as real for landline subscribers as they are for Verizon,” said Jeff Silva, analyst at Medley Global Advisors. “It appears, however, an already-difficult situation has been complicated by third-party attempts to politicize it and leverage it for other agendas. Wireless, by choice, is a substitute for wireline telephone service for millions of people, but not for everyone in every location and in every circumstance. At the same time, a full-scale Verizon landline fix doesn’t seem rational on a number of levels. Maybe there’s another option out there, but sometimes ideal solutions simply do not exist for some problems.”