WASHINGTON-A lobbying campaign is underway to kill anti-cloning legislation and cast it as an industry-orchestrated effort to monopolize the cellular phone extension business.
“CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association) has sponsored S.493 and H.R.2460 for the express purpose of eliminating competition,” said the Independent Cellular Services Association.
The Senate last year passed an anti-cloning bill sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). The House bill, which is pending in the telecommunications subcommittee, has backing from Reps. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) and Sam Johnson (R-Texas).
Meanwhile, a 1994 extension phone petition is pending before the Federal Communications Commission.
ICSA, which claims an open extension phones market would save consumers $3.4 million a year, has joined with Cellteck and MTC Communications to lobby Congress and the FCC to allow cloning when it is used to create extension wireless phones. The groups say they have support of the Small Business Administration.
In addition to curbing fraud, ICSA President Ron Foster said the bill’s language “also makes criminals of many of our members, other small legitimate cellular service firms and thousands of citizens, who have purchased or downloaded software from the Internet to reprogram phones to create their own extensions.”
“This bill is not about fraud, it is about competition,” said Foster.
The wireless industry disagrees, saying extension cell phones would interfere with radio-frequency fingerprinting and other fraud systems.
“It is a shame the kind of things people will try to do to make a profit with very little investment,” said Thomas Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
“Illegal cloning is designed for one purpose: That is to steal service,” Wheeler said. “You can dress it up with whatever clever rationale you can find, but at its core, it is taking something that doesn’t belong to you.”
Indeed, federal law enforcement authorities have discovered that an illegally cloned cellular phone is the tool of choice of hi-tech criminals.
ICSA’s Foster said cellular phone manufacturers are to blame for the problem by failing to make devices clone proof.
In addition, the ICSA charged that cellular carriers reached a settlement with C2+, a former extension phone company, to buy its silence on the issue by getting C2+ to withdraw its petition and dissolve its business.
Most cellular carriers, according to Foster, do not offer cellular extensions. Customers have to buy separate phones and numbers, and are charged separate access charges. Those that do, like Cellular One of Washington, D.C., charge $18 a month to add a second phone.
However, Foster says the same feature can be offered by others for a one-time charge of $100. He said the groups met with the House Judiciary Committee, which told Foster they were blindsided. In 1995, the Justice Department looked into the issue but relinquished the matter to the FCC.
