WASHINGTON-The wireless industry this week is preparing to argue before a federal appeals court in Oklahoma City that the Federal Communications Commission’s rules requiring wireless number portability were enacted improperly and should therefore be reversed.
Portability refers to telephone subscribers keeping their telephone number when switching service providers. The FCC has said that number portability is essential for competition to develop. The wireless industry has consistently argued that wireless number portability is not necessary due to the competition that exists in the industry.
The wireless industry is being led in its litigation efforts by Bell Atlantic Mobile who said in a brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit that the FCC should not have imposed the wireless number portability obligation on commercial mobile radio services providers because Congress only expected the obligation to be imposed on landline carriers.
The FCC acknowledged this in its response but said that “while the [Telecommunications] Act [of 1996] did not specifically address whether wireless carriers should have the same duty [of wireless number portability], it left unimpaired the [FCC’s] pre-existing authority to impose such regulations on those carriers where appropriate.”
BAM is being joined in its efforts by GTE Service Corp., AirTouch Communications, SBC Communications, Inc., and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
Last month, the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau granted a request by CTIA to extend the compliance deadline for wireless number portability from June 30, 1999, to March 31, 2000, but did not address whether the initial rules had been instituted improperly. This was not surprising since the wireless industry already had argued and lost these issues at the FCC during the reconsideration phase.
CTIA has another request pending before the FCC urging the agency to not enforce the wireless number portability rules until after the build out of personal communications services. This second request would delay implementation for at least five years at which time the FCC would re-evaluate the competitive market to see if wireless number portability is necessary for competition.
In a statement released with the extension order, Daniel Phythyon, chief of the Wireless Bureau, referred to the “forbearance” request as the next step in the process. “The majority of CMRS providers are not going to be able to make the current deadline. They need additional time to develop and test standards in order to provide wireless number portability. The next step in this process will be for the [FCC] to address CTIA’s petition for forbearance of local number portability which has a statutory deadline of Dec. 16, 1998,” Phythyon said.
The deadline extension was not entirely unexpected. When the FCC established the implementation schedule for wireless carriers, it recognized that due to the technical complexities of implementing wireless number portability, wireless carriers would require more time than local exchange carriers to deploy number portability. For this reason, the FCC said the Wireless Bureau could extend the deadline for no more than nine months if necessary.
The wireless industry consistently has claimed that every cell site in the United States must be modified for wireless number portability to be successful. LECs currently are implementing local number portability in five phases based on metropolitan statistical areas.
The wireless industry still is developing standards for wireless number portability. Standards for analog, Code Division Multiple Access and Time Division Multiple Access technologies are in the balloting process. Standards for Global System for Mobile communications technology are expected to be balloted early next year. The standard will define ways to separate the mobile identification number and the mobile directory number. The wireless industry has determined that this separation is necessary to allow for nationwide roaming. The FCC has decreed that wireless carriers implement wireless number portability while maintaining nationwide roaming.
Both CTIA requests are predicated on the belief that CMRS is different than wireline service and therefore should not be subject to the same competitive rules. “It is our members’ view that the competitive benefits [of wireless number portability] are outweighed by the burdens. This is not going to bankrupt anybody but we are [making] the claim that money that goes to one kind of activity cannot go to another activity. While number portability may not be totally unimportant, it is not as important as other things that wireless carriers have to deal with,” said Michael F. Altschul, CTIA’s vice president and general counsel.
