Carr Won't Recharter North American Numbering Council
The North American Numbering Council said Tuesday that it wouldn't be rechartered after its final meeting that day, and its functions will be absorbed into the FCC. The advisory committee has operated since 1995, and its charter expires Sept. 8.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
The agency will transition NANC’s functions to commission staff, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said during remarks at the start of the meeting. “Numbering is an issue that, all too frequently, people just take for granted. They just assume it's going to work without much oversight or thought at all,” he said. “But it takes a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to oversee this complicated system with so many different parties and issues in the mix.”
“We'll be working over the next few months to transition a lot of the NANC’s work to the commission itself, to the agency staff,” Carr said. According to its website, NANC was created to “advise the Commission on numbering issues and to make recommendations that foster efficient and impartial number administration.” In his remarks, Carr said the group had done important work on implementing the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and combating robocalls, and the FCC would continue calling on NANC’s current members for advice. “I don't think any one of you individually are going to be able to escape continuing to work and support the FCC's ongoing work on this.”
The FCC "will continue to receive input on our numbering policy from experts in the field through our public dockets and continued meetings on these important topics," said an agency spokesperson.
NANC’s designated federal officer, Christi Shewman, said that at the advisory committee's December meeting, it completed all the outstanding items given to it under the previous FCC. Its only other outstanding function is the work of the Numbering Administration Oversight Working Group (NAOWG), which oversees contracts related to the North American Numbering Plan and Reassigned Numbers Database, Shewman said, adding that those functions will be transferred to the FCC’s numbering staff. “There aren't any other details to share at this time.” NANC members appeared to have learned about the end of the council recently, as some referenced plans for future meetings in their presentation slides Tuesday.
NANC member Richard Shockey said at the meeting that he was “deeply, deeply concerned” about the issues that NANC oversees, such as exhaustion of the numbers governed by the North American Numbering Plan. “We just stay tuned for an NPRM?” Shockey asked Shewman. “Do we just wait?” NANC’s reports have been submitted to the Wireline Bureau, and any future commission action on those matters will be public, Shewman responded. NAOWG Chair Philip Linse, Lumen's director of public policy, said the sort of work that the group had done would need “a longer runway” without the input of NANC members. “We had very real-time kind of experiences associated with what we think would be beneficial in order to improve service to service providers.”