E-911 Tops FCC Agenda Headed for May Meeting
Chmn. Martin plans to ask for a vote on revamped E-911 location rules at the May 31 agenda meeting. Martin also will seek a vote on a Katrina report and order, which grows out of a June 2006 notice of proposed rulemaking. Also on the public safety front, sources said, notices of apparent liability against Sprint-Nextel, Alltel and U.S. Cellular for violating location capable handset rules are on circulation. Each notice proposes fines in excess of $1 million for violation of a mandate that 95% of their subscribers have location-capable handsets by Dec. 31, 2005 (CD Jan 8 p1).
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The E-911 proposal remains controversial. It would gauge how precisely carriers locate emergency calls be gauged at the individual public safety answering point (PSAP) level rather than by statewide averaging. The E-911 item also contains a notice of proposed rulemaking asking questions about the future of emergency calling. “The E-911 proposal is seen as highly questionable from a legal point of view and pretty impractical from an operational point of view,” said an attorney who represents carriers: “It’s something that has people understandably exercised.”
CTIA and wireless carriers have been lobbying the FCC to head off the order, but to little apparent effect. Dobson, the Rural Cellular Assn., T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless said in a filing last week that the order would be “unwise as well as unlawful” since the FCC “has no current proceeding to examine E911 accuracy, and no record on which it could base a new location accuracy requirement.” One question is whether the Commission will make enforceable the order sought by APCO.
A key question on the Katrina order is whether it will require carriers and others in industry to act on findings by the Independent Panel Reviewing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Communications Networks, which finished work last year. A source familiar with the order said it will play a role in setting priorities for the new Public Safety Bureau. In July 2006, the Commission sought comment on the panel’s report (CD June 20 Special Report).
Another possible agenda entry is a proposal to require that VoIP providers make their services accessible to Telecom Relay Service (TRS) users -- and contribute to the TRS Fund, as they do to the Universal Service Fund. Karen Strauss, consultant to TRS supplier Ultratec, told the FCC in an ex parte letter last week that more funding may be needed to provide such “IP captioned telephone” service. It would be “economically infeasible” to use proposed IP relay rates to compensate providers of TRS-accessible VoIP service, she said. Strauss said Fri. the disabled consider VoIP accessibility “an essential need” and have been talking with the FCC about it. But she didn’t know the item might be on the agenda.
Also set for a vote at the meeting, said an FCC official: An order acting on a Cox complaint about lack of access to apartment buildings for its phone service. Martin told NCTA last week that he had circulated an order addressing the Cox complaint (CD May 8 p1). Cable industry sources had expected the Commission to act on the Cox request, made several years ago, because the agency recently issued a rulemaking tentatively finding it could regulate exclusive video deals in apartments.