The Assn. of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) issued a statement last week emphasizing the importance of the FCC’s requiring that VoIP services provide full 911 capability. “When a VoIP user uses the technology to call 911, often the ’telephone number’ associated with the VoIP call is in a format that the 911 system cannot recognize,” APCO said. “Moreover, it is often not associated with a location in the 911 system database so the caller’s location may not be transmitted to the 911 center,” the group said. “The public has an expectation that telephone services will provide 911 and enhanced 911 capability regardless whether the telephone operates on the public switched network, wireless networks or on the Internet.”

The FCC late Thurs. turned down challenges by wireless carriers to changes the Commission had made to clarify its Enhanced 911 orders, including the definition of a valid request by a public safety answering point (PSAP). The Commission concluded that changes in its rules didn’t substantively alter carriers’ obligations under the E911 rules and that adequate notice had been given. The changes involved the so-called Richardson, Tex., order, in which Richardson originally had asked the FCC to spell out when PSAP requests for E911 Phase 2 service were valid. The agency said such requests were valid if any upgrades needed on a PSAP network would be completed within 6 months and if a PSAP had made a timely request to an LEC for trunking and other facilities. Cingular and Sprint PCS had asked the FCC to address their concerns about their obligations if a PSAP’s readiness to receive Phase 2 data were delayed. Instead of granting their petition for more stringent criteria to substantiate a PSAP request, the FCC included certain time frames and procedures clarifying the obligations of each party. They included a 15-day window after a PSAP service request was entered, during which a carrier could request documentation. T-Mobile USA, Nextel and Cingular Wireless challenged those changes, arguing that the FCC hadn’t adequately considered the complexities of when a PSAP or wireless operator was ready to deploy Phase 2 caller location information. “We disagree with Cingular that the Commission ‘cloaked’ its decisions as a clarification where none was needed and ‘conjured up an ambiguity even though none existed,'” the FCC said. “Rather, the Commission’s action was required to overcome the impasse that ensued when T- Mobile denied Richardson’s service request as invalid because Richardson was not fully capable of receiving and using the data at the time of its request,” the agency said. Comr. Martin supported the order but said in a separate statement he was concerned with its analysis of the FCC’s compliance with a U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., decision in Sprint v. FCC. That ruling held that the Commission had failed to provide proper notice for a rule clarification under the Administrative Procedure Act when its only notice was a bureau-level public notice, he wrote. “In this order, we conclude that a Bureau-level public notice did provide adequate notice, because, unlike in Sprint, the notice was published in the Federal Register and contained an initial regulatory flexibility analysis,” Martin said. “While I think this analysis is not unreasonable, we should avoid these issues. Ultimately, the Commission itself is responsible for the actions taken by the agency.” A better future course is to issue Commission-level notices, he said. “A full Commission-level notice is the vehicle explicitly called for by Sprint and would plainly satisfy the court’s concerns.”

State legislators fired back after FCC and industry representatives said the states weren’t doing enough to deploy enhanced 911 (E911) services. At the National Conference of State Legislatures winter legislative meeting in Washington, Brian Fontes of Cingular chided the sparse showing of state legislatures for allowing funds to be diverted from E911 phase 2 deployment. “It is in your lap,” he said: “It’s your responsibility to do something about E911.” But Kan. Rep. Carl Krehbiel (R) said the wireless industry was holding up E911 deployment in his state. He said wireless lobbyists, particularly those from Sprint and AT&T, had successfully prevented getting a surcharge added to cell phone bills that would have funded Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) upgrades. “The PSAPs can’t get the equipment,” he said. Krehbiel also said the FCC “gave the carriers a weapon” by requiring that PSAPs have E911 capabilities before requiring the carriers to provide E911 phase 2 service. He said he would have preferred to require carriers become E911 compliant first, which would have offered more incentives for PSAPs to push for upgrades. Also, the incentives to kill legislation for PSAP upgrades would disappear, Krehbiel said. When Fontes told Krehbiel he had incorrect facts and was speaking in “half truths,” Krehbiel said: “No I don’t!” He said that carriers, because they didn’t have price regulations, had adequate ability to recover their own costs for E911 upgrades. Va. Del. Harvey Morgan (R), Commerce & Labor Committee chmn., said he was told that the technology was less advanced and more expensive than hyped. He said PSAPs had funds available but weren’t using them, which is why the legislature diverted funds to other areas. Fontes and Genie Barton of the FCC Wireless Bureau said more accountability was needed from state leaders to push the PSAPs into making the necessary upgrades. Also, N.Y. Assemblyman Chris Ortloff (R) said he had difficulty getting information from carriers about the capabilities of E911 in his district. He said he killed his own bill to fund PSAPs because of questions he wasn’t able to answer. He also questioned if E911 would work in his rural district. “We can’t be found. We can’t even get a signal,” he said.

More than 10 voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) providers led by the Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition are getting together to create an unprecedented group to encourage a public policy that refrains from applying traditional telecom regulation to Internet voice communications. The ad hoc coalition, expected to be announced formally before the end of the year, will try to form voluntary agreements on some key common carrier obligations, such as universal service, E911, disability access and law enforcement monitoring of VoIP calls. “These legitimate concerns can be addressed without imposing heavy regulation on VoIP and… if they are addressed successfully the political pressure to regulate VoIP will dissipate,” said VON Coalition Chmn. Tom Evslin, who represents the ad hoc group.

FCC Chmn. Powell said it was necessary to “rethink” the social goal of universal service when applying it to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Speaking at a telecom forum sponsored by U. of Cal., San Diego, and the San Diego Telecom Council Tues. in San Diego, he said the first consideration was the program’s goal: “The purpose of the universal service program is… to get consumers ubiquity and affordability of services… If that goal is achieved you don’t need any money. You don’t need a govt. program just because it’s cool to have one.” Powell said he was “intrigued” by companies like Vonage that offered unlimited local and long distance calling for $35 monthly: “That is a better price proposition than a universal service program ever produced in a hundred years.” Powell said while consumers had to pay additional charges for the universal service program, “every technological innovation is creating more affordable alternatives for me without any of that help.” He said while the main goal remained to ensure that “every American should get access to the services in the digital revolution… you got to look at whether there is a new way to make sure they” do. Powell said the Commission would ensure that the universal service was protected during a transitional period, “but if every American tomorrow has voice over IP for 30 bucks then what’s the fund for? That’s not to say we won’t need it, we might still want it. But I challenge people to stop talking about ‘look what they do to the fund.’ Forget the fund.” He expressed concern that consumers ended up paying for the fund: “I am sure you would like to see that line on your bill to go away. There is a cost to consumers of the fund. So if you had VoIP and none of those charges, you'd have a pretty good deal.” Powell said with many questions remained unanswered, “we have a lot of learning to do before we start making decisions” on VoIP. He said there were 2 ways to approach the new technology: “turning Internet into a telephone and argue down… or you can start” from scratch “and regulate up to the extent that’s necessary. I am a huge believer that the ladder is the only reasonable thing to do, because [VoIP] is not a telephone. It is a new technology. I don’t want it treated like a 100- year-old common carrier model.” However, he clarified that it did “not mean I won’t be convinced that there are important public policy concerns that have to be regulated on top of it. But the burden should be on the government to prove that need.” Powell said if VoIP was defined as a telephone service, “you don’t believe what horrible [consequences] may fly out of that one definition. We'll spend the next 30 years trying to get rid of that.” He acknowledged it was important to solve problems related to 911, CALEA and others, but said: “I think that list is small -- we talk about 4 or 5 critical items that probably have to be addressed, versus hundreds of pages that you'd try to forbear from” otherwise. Powell also said he believed VoIP was an interstate service: “I don’t know whether it’s Internet or telephone, but I know it’s not local.” He said the FCC, not states, was the “principle regulatory authority” for VoIP: “We are working with states, but… the FCC is first in line to set the initial regulatory environment.”

County govts. in Kan. are asking the state legislature for laws in 2004 that would authorize local wireless E911 phone bill fees to pay for wireless phone location capabilities. County officials said the typical cost of an upgrade to wireless E911 was about $250,000 per 911 center. They said fewer than half of Kan. E911 centers could track the location of wireless phones. They said the recent FCC order requiring number porting from landline to wireless service had made critical the need for statewide wireless E911 location ability, but without the ability to levy fees to cover the cost, most counties would find the expense prohibitive. Wireless E911 fee bills failed to pass in 2003.

Time Warner Cable (TWC) announced it was rolling out Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) across its systems nationally with the help of MCI and Sprint. A spokesman said TWC could connect VoIP customers with one another, but it needed the help of traditional telcos to route calls through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) if it was to offer a truly national service in its 31 markets. This marks the first time a cable company has partnered with a telco on such a large scale. Although the companies said these were multiyear, multimillion-dollar agreements, no specifics were provided. TWC said it would pay MCI and Sprint for each line and then on a usage basis.

FCC Comr. Martin said Fri. he would be “inclined” to turn away incumbent LEC arguments that they couldn’t build out broadband until they got more deregulation of legacy systems. In a speech at a Practising Law Institute-FCBA telecom conference, Martin said ILECs told the Commission they couldn’t build out broadband infrastructure until they had investment incentives. He said the Commission gave them those incentives in the UNE Triennial Review Order’s broadband provisions so now it was up to the ILECs: “For years, incumbents have been saying ‘Deregulate our provision of broadband and we will invest.’ But now that broadband deployment is deregulated, they are saying ‘Deregulate our provision of historically monopoly service -- basic phone service -- and we will invest in broadband.’ They essentially are saying ‘Free us and we will invest.’ We have responded ‘Invest and you will be free.'”

Neb. Public Service Comr. Anne Boyle criticized a wireless industry voluntary consumer code Fri. for not holding carriers accountable for implementation. “Nobody really knows if they are abiding by it,” Boyle told a Progress & Freedom Foundation lunch. But Emory U. Prof. Paul Rubin argued that state regulations, including proposed rules in Cal., limited consumer rights by reducing options for finding lower prices.

ANAHEIM -- Cable executives took turns criticizing the 9th U.S. Appeals Court, San Francisco, on a policy panel Wed. at the Western Cable Show here, accusing the traditionally liberal court of undermining the industry by playing fast and loose with its interpretation of the law, particularly on what rights cities had in negotiating with cable companies. As to Charter Communications’ current lawsuit with Santa Cruz, Cal., Senior Vp Curt Shaw said bluntly: “We think the 9th Circuit has misapplied the law. We anticipate its ruling being reversed by the Supreme Court.”