Following up on a Federal Communications Commission inquiry into its local number portability implementation, AT&T Wireless Services Inc. filed a report with the government agency yesterday outlining the troubles the carrier has encountered with the LNP mandate, as well as the steps it has taken to fix the issues that had resulted in some customers waiting more than a week to have their wireless numbers ported in or ported out from the carrier.
In the report, AT&T Wireless admitted to difficulties in its LNP processes, which it attributed to a combination of factors, including technical limitations in its clearinghouse vendor’s systems and insufficient inter-carrier testing prior to the Nov. 24 LNP deadline.
AT&T Wireless explained that its LNP vendor Nightfire, which is an affiliate of NeuStar, ran into difficulties when problems with its system produced delays in each step of the porting process that eventually created a “considerable backlog of port-out requests.” Those problems included taking too long to verify and submit the port requests to AT&T Wireless for customer validation that eventually led to the carrier “routinely” responding to those requests after the “due date” and “time” of the port request had expired and a resulting “resolution required-due date expired” response to porting requests.
The Nightfire system also delayed transmitting responses back to the requesting carriers, which AT&T Wireless said was compounded by glitches in the Nightfire interface used by its porting agents to resolve the porting issues that caused additional delays in resolving the backlog problems.
AT&T Wireless noted that the insufficient testing with Telecommunications Services Inc., which most of the other wireless carriers selected for their porting services, was the result of two software upgrades TSI performed within the last four weeks prior to Nov. 24 that “shut down critical inter-carrier communications testing.”
In addition, AT&T Wireless claimed TSI’s software was designed to reject port requests with “due dates” outside of the Number Portability Administration Center’s business operating hours even though the carriers agreed that porting requests made outside the NPAC’s 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. operating hours on an automatic basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week. TSI had not had a chance to comment on this to RCR Wireless News by press time.
“These factors resulted in significant delays in processing both requests that [AT&T Wireless] received from other carriers to port out and requests that [AT&T Wireless] issued to other carriers to port in numbers,” the carrier said in its letter to FCC Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief John Muleta.
AT&T Wireless added that as soon as it identified the problems it “devoted substantial resources to solving them, prioritizing resolution of port-out requests over resolution of [AT&T Wireless’] own port-in requests.”
The carrier added that it has worked closely with its LNP vendor NeuStar to facilitate the corrections resulting in AT&T Wireless’ ability to respond to more than 90 percent of the backlogged port requests, its ability to respond to port requests within Wireless Intercarrier Communications Interface Specifications guidelines and specifically responding to port requests with a valid response within 30 minutes greater than 75 percent of the time.
