Omissions in a draft of a CTIA voluntary consumer code that’s to be unveiled next month include a failure to address wireless local number portability or Enhanced 911 issues, Neb. PSC Chmn. Anne Boyle told us this week. NARUC said earlier this week that CTIA’s code didn’t fully take into account principles NARUC approved at its summer meetings in Denver in areas such as carrier billing practices and wireless best practices (CD Aug 28 p8). “It is incomplete,” Boyle said. “Hopefully, they would keep it as an ‘open docket’ because the problems continue to come about and we need to be able to continue to address them.” She said issues not addressed in CTIA’s voluntary consumer code that should be included were: (1) Wireless LNP, which is part of NARUC’s proposed best practices. (2) E911, which NARUC’s proposals included in areas such as recommended nationwide uniform testing for E911 and public safety answering point emergency procedures. (3) Disclosure by carriers that all associated services attached to a number would cancel when that service was cancelled so that those services wouldn’t automatically be carried over when the number was reassigned. (4) Prominent display by carriers on bills of the FCC e-mail address and phone number for vetting consumer complaints. At a state’s request, similar information from a PUC also should be displayed, Boyle said. In some cases, individual carriers are addressing some of those issues, she said, but the outstanding factors should be part of the voluntary code because it would apply industrywide, she said. CTIA plans to release its voluntary consumer code Sept. 9 in Washington. A spokesman for the group said this week that CTIA was reviewing a letter from NARUC to Pres. Tom Wheeler that urged that NARUC’s ideas be incorporated into the code.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The Cal. PUC’s proposed Consumer Bill of Rights is either vitally necessary to protect customers from wireless carriers’ predations or will raise rates, curb innovation and undercut competition, debaters argued Thurs. under the auspices of the Pacific Research Institute. Supporter James Conran and opponent Raymond Gifford applied classic arguments for and against govt. intervention. Conran is an FCC Consumer Advisory Council member and is Cal. Small Business Assn. chmn. and Consumers First pres. Gifford is Progress & Freedom Foundation pres. and former Colo. PUC chmn.
NARUC said a CTIA voluntary consumer code to be unveiled next month didn’t fully implement principles NARUC approved last month at its summer meeting on carrier billing practices and wireless best practices. NARUC Pres. Stan Wise, a Ga. PSC commissioner, said CTIA’s work in that area was “commendable” but “the ideas in both of our resolutions will certainly improve the industry’s work. We strongly encourage CTIA to incorporate all the ideas and principles in those resolutions into its code.” State regulators have been evaluating wireless best practices as a possible means of averting service quality regulation. NARUC has been meeting with regulators and carriers on the issue and the wireless industry has been working on its own voluntary guidelines for best practices that would help customers compare factors such as service coverage across different companies. In May, the General Accounting Office recommended the FCC begin collecting service quality data in its annual report on the state of mobile wireless competition. CTIA plans to release its voluntary consumer code Sept. 9 in Washington. Wise, joined by Mich. Comr. Robert Nelson, chmn. of NARUC’s telecom committee, and Cal. Comr. Carl Wood, consumer affairs committee chmn., wrote to CTIA Pres. Tom Wheeler Tues. They suggested CTIA fold the principles of NARUC’s resolutions on wireless service quality into its voluntary code, starting with a NARUC resolution on carrier billing practices. They said the NARUC resolution “indicates clearly that carriers should be permitted to require consumers to pay a special purpose charge associated with a program or service that the government mandates the provider to provide to customers.” That recommendation included caveats that invoices should differentiate between charges imposed by a provider to recover the costs of meeting a govt. mandate and “those special purpose and other charges that are imposed or mandated by law.” It also proposed that providers collect no more than the cost of a particular mandate and account for how revenue from such charges was used. “A portion of the revenues collected relating to enhanced 911 or number portability should be refunded if any of those requirements are eliminated or overturned,” the NARUC recommendation said. A 2nd NARUC resolution IT suggested for inclusion supported the use of certain wireless best practices and a joint FCC, state and industry effort to examine voluntary “consumer- focused service quality standards.”
Telecom experts in Washington spent much of Fri. reading the FCC’s 576-page Triennial UNE order to glean details that weren’t available when the Commission voted on a sketchy outline of the order in Feb. At CompTel, where one staff member stayed up until 4 a.m. to finish reading the order, Pres. Russell Frisby said the expanded language included a few areas that could be problems and will be studied over the next week or 2. A team of analysts at Legg Mason concluded that the decision was no more positive for the Bells than it had been 6 months ago. The Bells generally were perceived to have won broadband deregulation but lost a battle against UNE-P competitors.
FCC Wireless Bureau Chief John Muleta and Robert Pepper, chief of development in the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis, used their cellphones to help rescue them from a Colo. gondola, the AP reported. Muleta and Pepper were attending the Aspen Summit sponsored by the Progress & Freedom Foundation and were touring Aspen Mountain when the gondola stopped 2/3 of the way down the mountain as operators apparently forgot there were people in the car, the AP said. They called 911 and directed authorities to their location. The 911 operator didn’t have E911 technology, the AP quoted Muleta as saying, and couldn’t locate him despite the fact that the phone had global positioning technology. “That’s why we take E-911 so seriously,” the AP quoted Muleta as saying. “It affects all of us. It’s not just something that happens to other people. It happened to us.”
Wireless carriers, privacy advocates and public safety groups differed over details of when federal law requires a mobile operator to divulge caller location information sent to a 911 center receiving an emergency call. The FCC sought feedback on a public safety petition on how provisions on customer privacy in the Communications Act intersected with newer language in the Patriot Act and other laws. One issue raised was the privacy protections when a 911 caller was dialing on behalf of someone else.
As many commercial wireless systems in affected areas of the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada were down within a short time after the blackout Thurs. due to congestion and a lack of backup power to transmitting sites, payphones seemed to be the next choice of those affected by the emergency. Modern cordless phones also didn’t prove reliable, as electricity cuts made them dysfunctional.
FCC Chmn. Powell urged consumers Thurs. to ask about E911 availability when choosing a wireless service and called on govt. officials and carriers to “redouble” their deployment efforts. “Consumers need to know that some wireless carriers have invested more than others in implementing E911,” he said. The Commission issued a consumer advisory that cautioned that in some areas 911 operators didn’t yet automatically receive the phone number and location of a wireless call. The advisory said that although much progress had been made on E911 in the last year, “some wireless carriers and some state and local governments have invested more than others in bringing this life-saving technology to consumers.” The Commission said more than 1/3 of emergency calls came from wireless phones. “Government officials and the wireless industry need to redouble their efforts to make this a number one priority,” Powell said. The consumer advisory came after he earlier this week outlined the FCC’s next steps on E911 in a speech at the Assn. of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) annual conference (CD Aug 12 p1). Senate Communications Subcommittee Chmn. Burns (R-Mont.) and Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) are co-sponsoring a bill (S-1250) that would require location technology for wireless calls and would bar states from taking money from E911 funds for other purposes. “Wireless consumers in all but a handful of states pay E911 surcharges on their bills that go to state and local governments for E911,” Powell said Thurs. “Consumers have every right to expect that money to be used for E911 upgrades.” The National Emergency Number Assn. lauded the FCC’s guidelines for consumers, saying most subscribers didn’t realize that public safety answering points could locate automatically only about 10% of wireless calls.
Small wireless carriers sent a flurry of petitions to the FCC seeking temporary waivers of Enhanced 911 Phase 2 obligations. Without additional time, the smallest carriers, or Tier 3, face an initial deadline of Sept. 1 for starting to sell automatic location identification (ALI)-capable handsets. MobileTel, which serves rural parishes in La., petitioned for a waiver, telling the FCC it originally planned a network-based Phase 2 solution, but found that “approach is not economically or technically feasible in its service area.” MobileTel is a Tier 3 carrier, which means it has fewer than 500,000 customers, with an analog and TDMA network. To meet E911 requirements and “market demands,” the carrier said it was moving to CDMA technology and would use a handset-based Phase 2 solution. MobileTel said it had begun installing CDMA technology and expected most customers would have transitioned by the end of 2007. The smallest carriers face a Phase 2 timetable that includes ensuring that by Nov. 30, 2004, all new digital handsets activated can transmit ALI data and by Dec. 31, 2005, ensuring 95% of subscribers have such handsets. MobileTel proposed a new schedule, with Sept. 30, 2005, for ensuring at least half of all new CDMA handsets sold are ALI-capable and Dec. 31, 2007, for 95% of CDMA subscribers having such handsets. It said a network-based Phase 2 solution would have cost $1-$1.5 million, which would have been “extraordinarily burdensome for a small rural carrier” and wouldn’t have guaranteed Phase 2 compliance. South Canaan Cellular Communications filed a separate petition outlining similar plans for a CDMA overlay and seeking the same timeline for a handset-based solution. “South Canaan has been unable to find any vendor that provides a handset-based solution for analog systems or that can provide a network-based solution in an economically feasible way,” it said. Because CDMA technology isn’t compatible with its existing network, the carrier said customers who bought CDMA phones before full deployment of the network overlay would have only intermittent digital service. Arctic Slope Telephone Assn. Coop (ASTAC) also sought a Phase 2 waiver, saying it was planning a handset- based technology. “Developers of handset-based solutions did not announce on a timely basis that they were discontinuing development of Phase 2 solutions for the TMDA protocol, including development of a TDMA-based ALI-capable handset,” the carrier said. It plans to overlay its existing network with GSM technology by Sept. 2005. “The fact that GSM handsets are not presently generally available would make it impossible for an operator such as ASTAC to meet the current handset deployment benchmarks even had its network conversion been completed,” it said. ASTAC sought an extended implementation schedule, including a Dec. 31, 2005, deadline for ensuring that all handsets sold and activated were ALI- capable. Public safety groups urged the FCC last month to not grant forbearance to Tier 3 carriers on certain E911 requirements. A coalition of Tier 3 carriers has a petition pending before the agency that asks for forbearance from enforcement of Phase 2 location accuracy requirements until after Dec. 31, 2005. Other carriers petitioning for a waiver included Leaco Rural Telephone Coop and Brazos Cellular Communications.
The Minn. PUC ruled that the voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) communications service of Vonage Holdings was a telephone service as defined by Minn. law. That finding (Case P-6214/C-03-108) means Vonage must obtain a PUC certificate, file tariffs and submit a plan to provide 911. The PUC was responding to a complaint by the Minn. Dept. of Commerce alleging Vonage was providing phone service without a state certificate or providing 911. Vonage had argued that its VoIP service was an unregulated information service that was not subject to state telecom regulation. The Minn. PUC staff said that from the perspective of a phone user, there was no difference between the service of Vonage and that of a phone company. The staff said Vonage advertised its offering as replacing a customer’s current phone provider and that state law defined phone service as being 2-way communications such as Vonage provided. The PUC didn’t address issues raised by some parties about the effects on universal service and intercarrier compensation if VoIP were ruled to be a phone service. The ruling simply established that the PUC had jurisdiction over Vonage because it was providing telephone service under Minn. law. The PUC gave Vonage 30 days from official publication of the order to comply.