WASHINGTON-The last gasp by the wireline industry to delay wireless local number portability was thwarted late Friday when a federal appeals court denied the emergency stay request of four rural wireline carriers and set a briefing schedule for a separate petition by the United States Telecom Association that does not have the Federal Communications Commission responding until Wednesday.
LNP is going forward as planned, but not without additional complaints by small wireline companies.
“It is likely that the FCC may have assumed that the carriers providing service in the top 100 metropolitan service areas have already deployed the hardware and software necessary to support number porting. With the development of competitive local exchange competition in urban areas, the commission may have expected that bona fide requests and the resulting deployment of number portability in the switches of the large carriers that predominantly serve these markets has already taken place,” said the Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies in a request for stay filed late Friday at the FCC. “In general, the service areas served by the 2-percent carriers (with operations both inside and outside of the top 100 MSAs) have not been subjected to requests for number portability from CLECs.”
The FCC is going forward with wireless local number portability by faith and fiat; it mandated LNP, and now it hopes it works.
Will the sky fall, will there be minor inconveniences or will it be smooth sailing? It is hard to tell, but last week saw everyone putting out the word. FCC Chairman Michael Powell participated in two press conferences and then did a satellite media tour of the top 100 MSAs. Similarly, the carriers flooded the scene with “we’re ready” press releases.
The impact of WLNP is hard to predict, but a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll released Friday suggested that the onslaught of switching expected today may not occur. Only 1 percent of 700 mobile-phone users contacted said they would switch. That number grows to 4 percent within a month.
According to analysts’ forecasts, anywhere from 6 to tens of millions of wireless and wireline customers are expected to flood retail outlets, recently installed call centers and Web sites during the next several months looking to take their phone number to another operator-or at least use the threat of moving to glean a better deal from their current providers.
While service level agreements between carriers, which are not required by the FCC for porting, are seen by some as a step in the right direction in easing porting issues, others warn they are not guarantees that carriers are prepared.
A number of wireless carriers speaking at a recent UBS Warburg investor conference in New York lent credence to these concerns, noting that despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in preparation for LNP, there will still be glitches.
USTA’s emergency stay request came one week after four rural wireline carriers also asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for an emergency stay.
The rural arguments are slightly different, focusing instead on routing a call from the rural carrier’s rate center-geographic distinctions used by state regulators and landline phone companies to determine how much to charge for carrying a call to a rate center of a different company. Currently, a long-distance carrier must connect calls that leave the rural telco’s rate center to the other end, and the customer is charged for the call. But the FCC said that if the ported number is calling a telephone number in the rate center of its original carrier, it must be considered a local call.
