Muleta Asks Carriers to Talk Turkey on E911
Wireless Bureau Chief John Muleta last week called in the 5 national carriers, Tier 2 and Tier 3 carriers, as well as the public safety community, for an unusual industry-wide meeting focusing on E911 compliance and the ability of carriers to meet fast-approaching deadlines, sources told us Tues.
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Several sources said Muleta’s main message was of concern about a fast-approaching deadline for selecting a solution so 95% of carriers’ customers have location-capable handsets by Dec. 31, 2005. Three of the 5 major carriers, Sprint, Nextel and Verizon, have embraced a handset-based solution, while Cingular and T-Mobile favor a network-based system.
Carriers also raised the issue of a recent petition by the Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) asking the FCC to define the area over which hand-set based systems must meet different reliability requirements. The Network Reliability & Interoperability Council (NRIC) is looking at the issue but appears unable to reach an agreement (CD Dec 7 p1). Muleta made clear, sources said, that the FCC still wants the NRIC process to work if it can.
“Muleta called the meeting,” said a carrier source. “The initial agenda was to talk about compliance with the Dec. 2005 date. He wanted to talk generally about E911 deployment and how it was going… We were there for a couple of hours. I walked away saying it was good to address all of these issues but I'm not sure what was achieved.” The source added: Muleta “is really concerned about a year from now -- are there going to be any hiccups between now and then.”
“The general message from the FCC was if carriers and PSAPs needed waivers from these rules, they should not wait to the last minute to file them at the FCC,” a 2nd carrier source said.
An FCC source said the meeting was generally positive in tone and called to assess whether carriers will have difficulty meeting the 95% mandate. Muleta didn’t commit to a 2nd industry-wide meeting, though many followup meetings with public safety and individual carriers and associations are likely.
“It was really information gathering,” the source said. “We had been hearing more and more rumblings from carriers telling us this may be a problem for us. We tried to get a handle on how broad of a problem it is.” The source said that to this point only the smallest carrier group has made a significant number of filings seeking waivers from the deadline.
The FCC source said the Commission wants feedback on unanticipated glitches. For example, in rural areas customers are sometimes reluctant to give up their analog phones because the reach can be better than for newer digital handsets. “There are very viable reasons why a customer may not want to give up a phone,” the source said. “The whole point was [for the carriers] to sit around and be able to discuss as openly as they can in front of their competitors the problems they face.”