WASHINGTON-The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association has asked the Federal Communications Commission to address three regulatory issues surrounding calling party pays, calling on the agency to “step up and deal with the anti-consumer problems that force each subscriber to see every cellular call as a collect call,” said CTIA President Tom Wheeler.
Calling party pays, now the wireless norm in most countries, puts the burden of payment for connecting with a wireless phone on the caller, rather than on the subscriber, which currently is the U.S. practice.
The filing, made a week ago, was a follow-up to comments submitted by the association and others in response to an FCC notice of inquiry. According to Wheeler, CTIA’s petition contained “no surprises and no new conditions, so there is no reason why the FCC can’t come up with a new rule making. This is not heavy lifting for the FCC.”
FCC commissioners, speaking on the subject at last week’s Wireless ’98 conference in Atlanta, disagreed with that assessment. Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth does not believe that this is the right time for the FCC to step in regarding CPP, and that the wireless industry itself first should try to craft the framework to make a nationwide ubiquitous system work. “There could be a lot of benefits from CPP, but first go to the carriers, and then come to the FCC,” he said. “The FCC should not be the first party to take this up. You should learn from the CPP programs already out there in the marketplace.”
Commissioner Michael Powell agreed, reminding the audience that “states is our middle name, and we do have to deal with a federal system. If we totally attempted to bulldoze the states out of the way, in the short term, you won’t get the certainty you want.”
While most carriers and manufacturers support the quick implementation of CPP, there are some nontechnical roadblocks, which CTIA believes the FCC can eliminate. “Only a few issues are still under debate, including, among other topics, the billing and jurisdictional issues surrounding CPP implementation,” the petition said. “If the commission utilizes the proposals CTIA has set forth in a notice of proposed rule making, these issues may be addressed directly and efficiently.”
A national notification policy covering all 50 states is sought by CTIA so that callers are given the same choices-agree to pay for the call or disconnect-at the time the call is placed; this item should not be handled on a state-by-state basis, CTIA wrote, and the commission has the authority to devise and implement such a plan. Specific charges do not need to be detailed during notification, the group added.
A written statement released following the filing also had CTIA saying, “The association also argues that the FCC must clarify that states cannot have inconsistent rules regarding CPP systems. Such systems would operate across state lines and could not logically be subject to different rules and different states.”
The commission also should reiterate its oversight of wireless rates. Such jurisdiction, which would impact CPP, already was authorized by Congress in 1993 and has been tested in the courts. “Once a service has been classified as [a] commercial mobile radio service, Section 332 pre-empts states from regulating the rates and entry of the carrier providing the service,” CTIA wrote. “Moreover, the CMRS carrier or its agent may perform billing and collection for CPP services and the local exchange carriers, except when acting as agents for the CMRS provider, need not be involved in providing the billing and collection. Clearly, when LEC involvement is limited in this way, there is no room for state authority.”
In addition, the commission was asked to develop a quasi-tariff that could be just information about CPP at this point. “We need a tariff substitute,” Wheeler said. “There is a need for knowing what consumers will have to pay. The commission already did something similar to this when it developed its long-distance dial-around policy.”
No hard numbers exist as to how CPP could drive a rise in minutes of use, but where CPP is standard or a subscriber option, revenues have risen; a recent study of usage in Argentina found that minutes of use increased three to four times when CPP was introduced. “This is not an issue to just drive minutes,” Wheeler said. “It is to get rid of the last vestige of difference between wireless and wireline.”
