WASHINGTON-A federal appeals court March 11 told the Federal Communications Commission it must first examine the impact of its local number portability rules on small wireline carriers before requiring them to port numbers to wireless carriers.
The FCC is expected to quickly seek comment on the impact of its intermodal rules on small carriers. Outgoing FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he expected the commission could “respond quickly to the D.C. Circuit’s directive and fully implement intermodal LNP.”
It is unclear how long the regulatory flexibility analysis will take, although FCC staff said it was a priority for the agency.
“There is no dispute that the FCC failed to comply with the Regulatory Flexibility Act’s requirement to prepare a final regulatory flexibility analysis regarding the rule’s impact on small entities,” wrote Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “Until that analysis is complete, we stay the effect of the order solely as it applies to those carriers that qualify as small entities under the RFA.”
To qualify for the RFA exemption, a wireline carrier must have fewer than 1,500 employees, said the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies in a note to members.
“This has been a hard-fought battle for rural carriers who deserve to have a regulatory flexibility analysis performed before the FCC adopts expensive regulations. Many rural carriers have already implemented LNP at great cost and very little customer demand. Ultimately rural companies and rural consumers are the ones who end up paying the price when the FCC doesn’t complete a regulatory flexibility analysis,” said Stuart Polikoff, OPASTCO director of government relations.
With or without the regulatory flexibility analysis, the top lawyer at CTIA believes that intermodal porting will soon be available to all Americans, because rural carriers are still required to complete wireless-to-wireless porting, and the bulk of the upgrades that rural carriers complain about are necessary to do wireless LNP.
“The real burden of implementing LNP comes from having to support the network side. You have to update your switches to support wireless-to-wireless porting,” said Michael Altschul, CTIA general counsel and senior vice president. “All a carrier has to do to support intermodal porting is have a fax machine to receive a porting request once the network upgrades have been made. That is not much of a burden. The real burden is querying the database and routing calls to the right carrier. It shouldn’t take long for the 10 percent that doesn’t have LNP to get it.”
The D.C. Circuit upheld wireless-to-wireless porting and intermodal porting for large wireline carriers.
