WASHINGTON-Fewer complaints regarding wireless local number portability appear were logged at the Federal Communications Commission in the last month.
The agency received fewer than 1,000 complaints regarding WLNP from Feb. 24 to March 24. This is down from a high of 2,400 complaints in the first month after WLNP was implemented Nov. 24. The FCC has received a total of 6,637 WLNP complaints since Nov. 24; less than 10 percent of these complaints concern consumers who want to cut the cord.
AT&T Wireless Services Inc. still has the most complaints with 2,923. Cingular Wireless L.L.C. received 900 total complaints.
Nextel had the fewest complaints with a total of 452; the company received only 32 complaints in the last month.
The actual number of problems with porting may be much lower than the FCC tally because each carrier in a porting transaction is noted with each phone call to the FCC’s call center and a disgruntled customer may call numerous times “The existence of a complaint does not necessarily indicate any wrongdoing by the carrier or carriers named, nor do the complaint numbers reflect the relative number of a carrier’s subscribers attempting to port a number,” said the FCC.
WLNP was implemented in the largest 100 metropolitan service areas on Nov. 24. All carriers are required to be capable of porting as of May 24. Small rural wireline carriers are fighting this requirement, claiming that although wireline LNP has been in place for years, they have not received a request to port and so they are not prepared to begin porting. A lawsuit challenging the requirement is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
