FCC Action Appears Near On Reducing Time Allowed for Inter-modal Ports
Industry groups and companies are increasing pressure on the FCC to act on a long-stalled item addressing what wireless carriers, state regulators and others see as too-long wireline and inter-modal porting intervals. A docket addressing porting appears ripe for FCC action, government and industry officials said last week, and could get attention as early as the May open meeting.
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The FCC has had a four-day “shot clock” for number ports for 12 years, though wireless carriers say they can complete the process in just 2-1/2 hours and have in place a voluntary agreement to do so. Shortening the porting interval appears to be one of a number of consumer items that has support of all three current commissioners and could get attention under acting Chairman Michael Copps.
Officials with T-Mobile met with Paul Murray and Jennifer Schneider, advisors to Copps, last week to make the case for a shorter porting interval. “Wireline customers regularly have to wait a week or more to port their numbers (including to T-Mobile’s @Home service),” the carrier said in a document distributed at that meeting. “When consumers get frustrated with slow porting, they often abandon efforts to switch carriers. … Shortening the interval will satisfy FCC objective of allowing consumers to retain their numbers without impairment of quality, reliability, or convenience, when they switch providers.” T-Mobile also said eliminating long porting time frames “will reduce opportunity for anti- competitive mischief.”
The Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance talked number porting this month separately with aides to Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Robert McDowell. The group felt compelled to do so after Congress sent the FCC a letter urging resolution on the issue, said ITTA President Curt Stamp, in an interview. Stamp hasn’t “heard specifically” that the proceeding is moving at the FCC, but action soon is possible, he said. The porting issue has been “teed up to the point where if” the commissioners “wanted to act, they could,” he said.
Copps received a letter in March from Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., Bart Stupak, D-Mich. and nine other members of Congress. They urged the FCC to “resolve the delay in wireline and intermodal ports expeditiously” by reducing the interval to 48 hours. “It is unacceptable that with all the advances in technology, the wireline porting interval has remained at 4 business days for more than 10 years and wireline operators have failed to present any reasonable technical basis for such delay,” they said. “We believe these long delays deter competition that the 1996 Act aimed to promote.”
States have also been putting pressure on the FCC to shorten the number-porting shot clock. In a letter last week to Copps, Commissioner Sharon Gillet of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable urged the FCC to reduce the interval to one day. “The FCC raised the question of shortening the wireline porting interval in notices of proposed rulemaking in 2003, 2004, and 2007,” Gillet wrote. “In the most recent notice, the Commission tentatively concluded that the porting interval should be reduced. Yet now, 16 months later (and almost six years after the question was first raised), no action has been taken. I believe the time for resolving this issue is long past due.”