Telcos Slam Telcordia Effort to Overthrow Porting Database Management

NAPM said the “relief requested by Telcordia … merely reflects Telcordia’s disagreement with the good faith judgement of the NAPM LLC and an attempt to substitute Telcordia’s judgement.” NAPM members include the largest providers of voice service: AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Comcast, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel, CenturyLink and XO Communications. All but three filed separate comments urging the FCC to deny the Telcordia petition. T-Mobile and CenturyLink didn’t file.

Database vendor Neustar said Telcordia seeks commission intervention “to gain commercial advantage.” Neustar has a contract with NAPM to run the number portability database until 2015. NAPM has allowed Telcordia and other vendors to submit competing proposals, but NAPM hasn’t found anyone that can provide better service at a lower price, Neustar said. “Now Telcordia is running to the Commission, seeking extraordinary intervention simply because it did not like the outcome of this competitive process.”

Telcordia’s petition specifically questions the legality of an amendment that added three new fields in the NPAC database introduced by Neustar and NAPM. The fields allow carriers to optionally include IP information that can be used to complete local number porting requests. Neustar said the IP fields were added because the industry is moving to all-IP networks. Telcordia doesn’t like the move, Neustar said, because the company has its own IP routing database and wants to keep Neustar out of the business. However, “Telcordia fails to identify any marketplace failure that warrants government intervention.”

Telcordia hasn’t shown how NAPM harmed the public interest or acted anti-competitively, NAPM said. But granting Telcordia’s petition could hurt consumer phone service quality “by adversely impacting the operations and immediate enhancement of the [number porting database] in the seven separate United State regions,” it said.

Telcordia got some support from Comcast, the lone cable member of NAPM. Telcordia raised “several important policy concerns regarding the current regime for administering number portability databases that warrant thoughtful consideration,” Comcast said. The current administrative system has mostly worked, but the communications industry has seem “dramatic” technological changes, the cable operator said. LNP administrative services should be competitive, but Neustar has been administrator for more than a decade, Comcast added. The FCC “should explore ways to give voice providers a choice” among database providers.

Adding IP fields may exceed NAPM’s jurisdiction, because the North American Numbering Council, “not the NAPM, is responsible for determining ‘what specific information is necessary’ to route telephone calls to the appropriate provider,'” Comcast said. Also, the FCC has said the porting database “should be ‘limited to the information necessary to route telephone calls to the appropriate service providers,” but the industry never agreed IP information is needed to route voice phone calls, the company said. And it’s unclear whether NAPM considered that the fields will increase costs of operating regional porting databases, it added.

However, most NAPM member companies condemned the Telcordia petition. “Not only does it seek to embroil the Commission in what is essentially a commercial dispute involving vendors but it is premature and moot,” said Qwest. Telcordia should have brought its arguments before NANC, which handles dispute resolution and oversees number management, the big carrier added. Telcordia is upset “because NAPM didn’t accept its two unsolicited proposals and chose an arrangement with Neustar instead,” said AT&T. NAPM is the right group to choose what vendor handles the porting database because it’s composed of carriers with incentive to keep porting costs low, the carrier said.

NAPM includes members from “all sectors of the telecom industry,” said Sprint. NAPM’s decision to adopt the new IP fields “was done so following the appropriate industry consensus and supermajority procedures,” it said. “The NAPM LLC acted within its authority, charter and organization scope.” Banning IP information in the database could actually hurt competition, said XO Communications. “It is much more efficient for XO, which runs an IP network, to exchange traffic at an IP level rather than being forced to transcode transmissions from IP to TDM to send to another network, only to have the transmission possibly transcoded back to IP for termination.”