FCC Ready to Hand Down Penalties for Failure to Meet Handset Mandate
The FCC is preparing to release notices of apparent liability against Sprint Nextel, Nextel Partners, Alltel and U.S. Cellular for failing to meet a location-capable handset requirement. By law, the FCC must act by Aug. 31 on at least one of the carriers, and Chairman Kevin Martin hopes to release all the notices at the same time, sources said. The amount of the penalties isn’t set.
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In January, the commission referred the four to the Enforcement Bureau for possible financial penalties after each fell short of an FCC requirement that 95 percent of their subscribers have location-capable handsets by the end of 2005. “We definitely want to move forward,” on improving E-911 accuracy, said a public safety official. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.”
“We have been hearing rumblings something is coming,” said a carrier source. “I'm not sure where they are going to go.” An attorney who represents carriers noted that the four companies have known for some time that they will be punished: “This has been a while coming, so companies just need to get this behind them and move on.”
The FCC has signaled repeatedly that it will take a hard line in other areas as well, through a series of orders addressing shortcomings of smaller carriers in meeting a similar mandate and in requiring VoIP operators to make their systems E-911 compliant. Verizon Wireless, Leap, Qwest Wireless and Centennial, the other major carriers that use of a handset-based E-911 solution, also missed the deadline but had taken enough corrective action not to be referred to the Enforcement Bureau.