Sprint Nextel Alone in Seeking CPNI Waiver
Sprint Nextel last week was the only wireless carrier to seek a waiver of new FCC regulations to protect customer proprietary network information (CPNI). The rules took effect Saturday. Other carriers said Friday that they are complying with the rule, though at least one acknowledged the high cost of making the network changes needed.
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In March, the commission changed CPNI rules to require that carriers get “opt-in consent” before sharing customer data with joint venture partners or independent contractors for marketing. The agency also barred carriers from releasing a customer’s phone call records unless provided a password. Carriers also must to notify customers of all account changes. The FCC approved the changes at its March 22 meeting.
Sprint Nextel asked for a waiver through June 2008, saying it’s installing a new system but hasn’t moved all its subscribers to its new unified billing platform (UBP), which enables automatic adherence to the new rules. Sprint, which merged with Nextel in 2005, has put a “substantial” sum into the new system, it said. The actual total and other Sprint outlays were blacked out of a company filing to the FCC.
“Sprint Nextel designed, tested, and installed a customer-focused CPNI-compliant solution on the UBP. Sprint Nextel also migrated millions of wireless customers to the CPNI compliant UBP,” the carrier said. “Now, a limited waiver for a short period of time is needed while Sprint Nextel completes an orderly migration of the remaining wireless customers to the UBP.”
Some aspects of compliance are expensive, said Laurie Itkin, director of government affairs at Leap Wireless. For example, Leap mostly communicates with subscribers in text messages sent to mobile phones, she told us. Leap will tell customers when someone requests their CPNI, a “cumbersome and expensive” process, she said. “We do not have any mechanism in the billing system to automatically generate a text message,” Itkin said. “A human being will have to manually type in a message. It’s onerous, but we have to do it manually.”
Other carriers would say Friday only that they're following the new rules. “AT&T has implemented a variety of safeguards to protect the personal information of our customers, including incorporating the Commission’s new requirements,” said an AT&T spokesman. “We monitor, evaluate and enhance these measures on an ongoing process, but we don’t like to discuss the details of our business security measures publicly because we don’t want to tip off the bad guys… Overall, our goal is to make customer accounts as secure as possible against data burglars, while at the same time enabling legitimate customers to obtain information about their own service.”
“Verizon will be in compliance,” the carrier said. “We have worked hard to protect CPNI and ensure the best possible consumer experience.”