CTIA Emphasizes LNP For Consumers, Carriers
By Mark Rockwell, January 8, 2003
Wireless Week
wirelessweek.com
WASHINGTON-CTIA President and CEO Tom Wheeler says his last year at the association will be the year 'someone speaks up for the consumer' about inequities in wireless regulation. And he wants to make special efforts on the local number portability issue, starting with getting regulators on the path to reconfigure the regulatory landscape for LNP issues.
At a press briefing today, Wheeler cited a number of issues, including service coverage, E911, regulatory necessity and LNP as CTIA's priorities for the coming year.
However, he emphasized that LNP rules for wireless and wireline carriers should be brought more in line with each other. As things stand now, wireless LNP is 'a fraud on consumers' because wireline carriers aren't required to port their numbers to wireless carriers unless there's a wireline switch located at the same 'rate center' as a wireless switch. Wireless carriers have switches in only one of eight wireline rate centers, meaning, according to Wheeler, that 90 percent of wireline customers that request to take their telephone number with them to a new wireless account can't do so.
'Ninety percent of numbers won't be portable between wireline and wireless carriers,' he says. 'When you create an environment where 90 percent of callers are denied what they want' regulators aren't doing their jobs, he says. Applying the same requirements on wireline carriers for LNP as are required of wireless carriers should be the aim of any LNP regulation, he says. 'Our petition says, 'if you're going to do [LNP], do it right,'' he says.
Along those lines, CTIA recently filed a motion at the D.C. circuit court asking that it decide on whether there is a level playing between wireline and wireless companies when in comes to LNP. The filing won't affect an approaching Nov. 24 deadline for wireless carriers to implement some LNP, according to Wheeler. |
