WASHINGTON-James Schlicting and Diane Cornell, two highly regarded Federal Communications
Commission regulators with strong management and common carrier policy backgrounds, are expected to join new
Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Thomas Sugrue’s team.
Sources said the FCC could announce front-
office bureau changes on Tuesday, when Sugrue officially becomes bureau head. WTB Deputy Chief Gerald Vaughan
has been acting chief since Daniel Phythyon, former wireless bureau chief, stepped down Dec. 1 after a tumultuous
year-and-a-half tenure that had the bureau under constant fire from industry and Congress for lackluster deregulation
and inefficient management.
Schlicting, deputy Common Carrier Bureau chief since January 1998, is slated to be
second in command to Sugrue.
Cornell most recently served as chief of the International Bureau’s
telecommunications division. Before that, she was an adviser to several FCC commissioners (including former FCC
Chairman Reed Hundt) and was a policy analyst in the Common Carrier Bureau from 1987 to 1988.
On the new
management team, sources said it would not be surprising if Cornell got an associate deputy bureau chief post or
something similar.
Both people worked with Sugrue on FCC common carrier matters in the past, and each was in
private law practice previously.
Schlicting and Cornell declined to comment.
It is uncertain what responsibilities
WTB deputy bureau chiefs Gerald Vaughan and Kathleen Ham, and others in the top-heavy front office (according to
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) will have under Sugrue.
McCain and other key
telecom lawmakers last session threatened to overhaul the FCC this year.
Rosalind Allen lost her deputy bureau post
in the shakeup, but her new assignment is not known.
Meribeth McCarrick, WTB spokeswoman, said the FCC does
not comment on rumors of personnel changes.
That Sugrue, Schlicting and Cornell are steeped in common carrier
policy, and are taking over WTB at a time when the commercial wireless industry’s overarching complaint against the
FCC is it regulates competitive wireless carriers and local monopoly landline carriers with the same common carrier
broad brush, raises the question of whether their common carrier expertise will be an asset or liability.
For now,
wireless industry leaders appear to be willing to give the new WTB management the benefit of the doubt and publicly
say they have great expectations for the new WTB front office.
The new WTB management team is known to
wireless lobbyists to varying decrees.
“We obviously are looking forward to working with him [Sugrue] and
were encouraged by the appointment. [That] hope extends to others joining him,” said Thomas Wheeler,
president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
Alan Shark, head of the American Mobile
Telecommunications Industry Association, agreed.
“We’re going to have some very positive and dramatic
changes at the bureau,” said Shark, whose biggest gripe with WTB in recent years has been the slow pace with
which the bureau has moved on processing license applications and issuing new rules.
Shark said industry can deal
with policy differences, but “uncertainty is worse.”
Mark Crosby, president of the Industrial
Telecommunications Association, said he knows neither Schlicting nor Cornell.
But, he said, “It’s not
particularly relevant who he brings in. We need to mount an educational effort” on private wireless.
Part of
that initiative will be an attempt to sidetrack FCC plans to auction private wireless frequencies.
A Personal
Communications Industry Association spokeswoman declined to comment until the new WTB management team is
official.
RCR reporter Heather Forsgren Weaver contributed to this report.
