Tom Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, will have spent two weeks on the road before he returns home to Washington, D.C. Wheeler was scheduled to spend the first week in Cannes, France, at the GSM MOU conference and this week hosting Wireless ’98, the association’s largest conference and exposition thus far in its history. He plans to get much accomplished during this fortnight, and this interview was scheduled to take place during his cab ride to Dulles International Airport.
As a result, RCR and CTIA found out firsthand that encryption works. Tom’s half of the conversation took place from an encrypted phone, which could not be decoded even from a digital converter/recorder installed on RCR’s digital phones in the Washington, D.C., bureau. After hunting Wheeler down in Cannes, with help from the CTIA staff over President’s Day weekend, he and RCR Washington reporter Debra Wayne talked via a nonencrypted conventional phone about the show and about 1998 industry issues in which CTIA is participating on behalf of its constituents.
RCR: Continuing our conversation after being so rudely disconnected by technology, how do you see this show as being unique from others preceding it?
WHEELER: Meetings such as this are important to the industry for two principal reasons-it’s an opportunity to explain to the outside world who we are and what we are all about and, in that regard, we will have more than 300 reporters at this convention. Secondly, we get to explain ourselves to ourselves, to identify the issues that are important to the continued growth and success of the industry, and to be able to learn from each other and to get a picture of what the coming year will look like.
RCR: How much foreign participation is anticipated for this show, which will register more than 20,000 attendees?
WHEELER: Right now, we have about 24 different countries, making up about 10 percent of the registration. In that regard, we have tried to make the convention more visitor-friendly. We will have simultaneous translation at the major sessions in six languages, signage around the halls will be in six languages, there will be a special international visitors’ center and lounge, and we’ve also tried to develop programs that are less “let us show you how smart we are,” and more an opportunity of “how can our international visitors share their experiences with others and how can we learn from them.”
RCR: Has the Asian monetary crisis had an impact on the number of Pacific Rim attendees and exhibitors?
WHEELER: To the best of my knowledge, there have not been any dropouts from major exhibitors and, obviously, we will not know what has happened about registration until it is over. We have not felt a serious impact.
RCR: What do you plan to tell attendees about universal service?
WHEELER: Universal service is something that CTIA supported during the legislative process as a part of being a full-fledged player in telecommunications services. It is fair to say that we are concerned, if not disappointed, at some of the ways in which it has been implemented.
RCR: Will you be making a concerted effort both to get things clarified at the Federal Communications Commission and to come up with a better methodology for determining how wireless contributions into the universal service fund are calculated? Would you even ask for forbearance?
WHEELER: I think that CTIA urged the commission to allow carriers to make the determination as to which funds go into interstate calculations and which funds go into intrastate calculations. That has resulted in highly disparate swings of back and forth, depending on market circumstances. It might be time to begin to explore another approach to the wireless obligation to support universal service. As you know, we petitioned the FCC and they rejected our argument that Section 332 of the Telecommunications Act should be pre-emptive of wireless carriers having to contribute into local universal service. I still think that Section 332 is the policy that holds for wireless. I also think we should begin to take a look and explore other ways in which 332 can be applied so as to fulfill the expectations of universal service contributions, but to fulfill them in a way in which there is some type of common approach.
RCR: Despite presidential, congressional and agency mandates, FCC Chairman Bill Kennard has changed his stance somewhat on tower siting recently, in that he is proposing a more conciliatory methodology of working with state and local governments regarding the buildout of new wireless networks. What will you tell attendees whose businesses are on hold because of moratoria of one kind or another?
WHEELER: Clearly, there is a responsibility at all levels of government to provide for the infrastructure to enable both safety and competition that the government has called for. It is federal policy that there will be multiple competitive wireless providers in a market, and that those carriers are able to have antennas that cover their service territory. It is also federal policy that wireless carriers shall provide universal access to 911 and other emergency services. That universal access requires antennas.
There is a role for all levels of government to help in fulfilling those mandates. It is sad that somehow this has been portrayed in the past as an effort by CTIA or the wireless industry to gut local authority and impose some kind of uniform mandate on localities. That’s not the case. We are not trying to remove legitimate local authority; we’re trying to say to the local government, “How can you recognize and accept your responsibility to federal policy?” We’re trying to say to the FCC, “How can you facilitate your responsibility and thus facilitate the fulfillment of the responsibility placed on our shoulders for safety and competition?”
I don’t think that means walking in with seven-league boots and walking all over local sensibilities. On the other hand, such a “come let us reason together” attitude cannot be seen by local governments as an opportunity to thumb their nose at legitimate safety and competitive functions that wireless brings. Having said that, I think we are in the classic situation where antenna siting, in the vast majority of cases, is moving forward. The question is, how do we deal with the minority of cases. That’s where we hope to look for some leadership from the FCC, not to federalize local siting but rather to help local governments deal with their responsibilities in dealing with a federal communications plan. That’s what we’ve been asking the commission to do.
RCR: What else has CTIA asked the FCC to do to get tower siting off the ground?
WHEELER: I asked the chairman in a letter last October to put together a group that would sit down, roll up its sleeves and say, “Okay, how do we address this?” Unfortunately, the silence from the commission has been deafening.
RCR: Again, targeting state and local governments, how can continued problems with interconnection policy be handled? In this age of competition, do all existing interconnection agreements need to be renegotiated, because they all were based on wireline models?
WHEELER: I go back to the observation the Wall Street Journal made when it reported on the FCC’s interconnection policy to the effect that the least ambiguous winner was the wireless industry. I guess that differentiates between the commercial mobile radio services and the paging industry. In cellular and personal communications services, I think we have made strides since the FCC’s decision. Yes, we have further to go but I won’t make light of the incredible progress that has been made thus far.
When the FCC’s decision was made, the average interconnection price was three to five cents a minute. Now it’s down to the half-cent-per-minute range. Should it go lower? Most assuredly. All the signs show that the cost of pro
viding service is significantly less, and we have to begin to move interconnection
toward cost.
The establishment of reciprocity has been significant, but I know on the paging side of the house they have been less successful. But we should not judge the cellular and PCS experience by the paging experience.
RCR: The Telecommunications Resellers Association recently asked the FCC to consider changing its rules regarding the sunset of mandatory resale agreements, citing a survey that showed that PCS and specialized mobile radio operators had little interest in offering resale opportunities. Does the association have a case? Keep in mind that 100 percent of the survey respondents were cellular resellers.
WHEELER: I find it fascinating that what they really are asking for is not to resell, but to resell for a price they like. They’re saying to the government, “Come in and regulate prices so that we can make margins we like without making the necessary facilities arrangements.”
If you were existing in an environment where there was no competition, perhaps there was at one point in time a rationale for government involvement in resale. In an environment where there are almost 60 markets in which there are five or more wireless carriers, there are ample opportunities for a reseller to play one off another to get the best deal. What I really think we are hearing the resellers say is, “Help me do the work I don’t want to do in the marketplace in terms of behaving like a capitalist and having competitors compete to provide me service. Dear Government, won’t you make it easier for me to provide one stop shopping at a guaranteed price,” and I don’t think that’s the theory in today’s competitive market.
RCR: What about the progress, or lack of it, made toward a final Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act agreement. The FCC’s notice on CALEA is in the reply-comment stage, and there still doesn’t appear to be much bending on the FBI’s part.
WHEELER: The wireless industry, which supported the passage of CALEA, has met every single one of the obligations that the law put on us, specifically the development of standards to implement the provisions of CALEA. We met them despite the efforts of the FBI to slow down the process. It is interesting that the FBI is now almost three years behind in its obligations to come out with capacity requirements. It is obviously important when we implement the act that we know what the capacity requirements are going to be. We have developed the capability standards on time, despite the FBI’s intransigence, the FBI’s bullying tactics and its just plain ignoring of the deadline that was established by law for them to come up with capacity standards.
RCR: What will Congress do to make the FBI comply with legislative mandates?
WHEELER: Congress as a whole is pretty fed up with the FBI’s inability to move forward with this issue. As recently as two weeks ago, we sent to them some Justice Department correspondence and our reply to their heavy-handed threats to “do it my way or else” in contravention of clear instructions from the Congress regarding CALEA standards. It would be shocking to me if the Congress did not move the October 1998 compliance date in light of the FBI’s bullying tactics.
RCR: And now for the fun opinion. Now that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has passed the two-year mark, is it okay or does it need to be tweaked?
WHEELER: I think we all got spoiled by the fact that we had 60 years of the legal precedence that had been built up around the Telecommunications Act of 1934. Now we have to go back and establish the same types of legal precedence again. Certainly the Congress will want to take a look this year on what they felt was the intent and how it has been implemented by the FCC and by the courts. Surely there are some areas-universal service leaps to mind-where the Congress already has indicated a serious concern about the way things have turned out.
RCR: And on a different note, what do you hope will be accomplished at Cannes that you can report to CTIA attendees in Atlanta?
WHEELER: I come to Cannes for the purpose of understanding better what the GSM community has been doing internationally and representing our GSM carriers. I also come to Cannes wearing my Cibernet hat. While we focus a lot on technology, this is a business driven by financial realty, and there can be no financial realities if there is not a structure in place whereby carriers can economically settle each other’s roaming calls. We have for more than 10 years been providing that service in the Americas, and we now have a subsidiary-Cibernet plc-in London that does multilateral, multicurrency net settlements at a fraction of the cost of what an individual carrier could do for themselves. So we will be talking about how this facilitates increased global roaming.
RCR: When will the average wireless user be able to roam globally and ubiquitously?
WHEELER: International roaming today will be facilitated by dual- and trimode phones. Yes, I have to take my SIM card out of my GSM phone that I use in the United States and put it into my European GSM phone but it’s still the same SIM card and I’m doing international roaming. The next iteration is going to be much simpler in that I will have a dual-band phone where I won’t need to change the SIM card. Here at Wireless ’98 in Atlanta, we will see trimode phones that will operate across multiple frequencies and multiple digital air interfaces.
