WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission should require carriers to identify traffic and pass along identifications as the call moves through the network, but not require carriers to use a technical fix favored by mid-sized wireline carriers that larger wireline and wireless carriers believe is outmoded, CTIA told the FCC late Wednesday the agency struggles with solving the phantom-traffic problem.
Phantom traffic is network activity that cannot be billed—either no one claims the traffic or the originator cannot be identified. The situation can eat into carriers’ bottom lines since network time and resources are being used, but no one is getting paid.
“CTIA continues to support a basic obligation on originating carriers to transmit call origination information pursuant to FCC rules and industry standards and for tandem-transit providers or any other provider in the transmission chain to pass along all call origination information received from the originating carriers, or subsequent carrier in the chain, without alteration,” said Paul Garnett, CTIA assistant vice president of regulatory affairs. But, CTIA “opposes what is essentially mandatory population of the Jurisdiction Information Parameter, which would impose significant costs with only limited benefits.”
The United States Telecom Association, which recently rebranded as USTelecom, was supported by midsize and rural incumbent local exchange carriers in calling for populating the jurisdictional information parameter. To be populated, the JIP would contain geographic information.
While the wireline industry has been pushing for requiring JIP population, the FCC has been reluctant because if JIP population was required and then the JIP was not populated, the SS7 would reject the call and the call would be dropped. According to the International Engineering Consortium, SS7 or Signaling System 7 “is an architecture for performing out-of-band signaling in support of the call-establishment, billing, routing, and information-exchange functions of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). It identifies functions to be performed by a signaling-system network and a protocol to enable their performance.”
The wireline carriers supporting JIP population believe it will help identify phantom traffic so it can be billed properly. The wireless industry believes that it would not give true location since the JIP would be populated with the location of the first switch that transmits a call, which could be across a state line from where the call was placed.
“To make JIP mandatory would require costly and time-consuming investments in legacy circuit-switched networks that would be unnecessary after full unification of the intercarrier-compensation system. Importantly, the JIP, which only indicates the location of the first point of switching, often does not identify originating jurisdiction of a call, particularly in the case of wireless calls, and thus would create rather than resolve traffic-jurisdictional disputes,” said Garnett.
In addition to requiring carriers to populate the JIP, USTA set out a new complaint procedure for phantom traffic.
