Big, Small Carriers Clash Over Roaming Rules at FCC
The major national wireless carriers clashed with smaller carriers in reply comments at the FCC over whether to revise rules to guarantee equitable roaming rates across the U.S.. With each side accusing the other of overcharging, comments on an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking are getting close scrutiny because the FCC is interested in rural issues, sources said. Commission Democrats, in particular, have raised concerns about roaming.
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Chmn. “Martin obviously is concerned about rural issues, so we may have a little bit of a drive to this,” said a source with a carriers calling for roaming reform: “If we don’t [see action] we may go get some help from the Hill on how to move this along.” Proponents of reform plan more meetings at the FCC and on Capitol Hill.
“Does this have any juice?” a carrier source said. “It’s hard to tell, but there is a lot of interest on this FCC on rural issues.”
Leap Wireless, a leader among companies urging Commission action, complained in a filing that carriers offer much better rates to affiliates and to MVNOs than to other carriers seeking roaming agreements. “Leap’s efforts to introduce an occasional roaming capability to its subscribers have been greatly impeded by large carriers who have refused to negotiate reasonable terms with Leap, even though their services are technologically compatible and they have plenty of available capacity on their networks.” SunCom Wireless said the FCC “must provide a regulatory environment that prohibits consolidated nationwide carriers from using their unrivaled market power to the disadvantage of smaller carriers’ customers.”
Centennial Communications conceded the fight is a classic case of “where you stand depends on where you sit.” But the record shows that manual roaming - in which a subscriber has to contact a competing regional carrier when no roaming relationship exists -- “does not work,” Centennial said: “VeriSign - ’the largest provider of manual roaming service in the U.S.’ - reports that of more than 13 million manual roaming attempts per month, only about 18 thousand calls are actually completed. In other words, 99.8+% of the time, consumers give up when forced to deal with the process of setting up a relationship with the roamed-on carrier.”
T-Mobile countered that the market is working. “As Congress and the Commission have long envisioned, the success and resiliency of the mobile marketplace has been due to pro- competitive, deregulatory policies,” it said. “Regulation in this case is unnecessary because regulatory intervention into roaming relationships would harm, not benefit consumers.”
“The Commission has recognized that an automatic roaming requirement is inconsistent with both the deregulatory mandate of the Telecommunications Act… and the FCC’s general policy of allowing market forces, rather than regulation, to shape the development of wireless services,” Cingular said.