More Data Could Help Rural Call Completion, Panelists Say
ORLANDO, Fla. -- The circulating FCC draft order on rural call completion (CD Sept 18 p1) won’t solve the problem of dropped calls to rural areas, but it might give the agency the tool it needs to pursue real enforcement of rules requiring call completion, panelists said Wednesday at the Comptel convention. Some questioned whether the rules might be more helpful in tracking down the problem if intermediate carriers were required to collect and report data as well.
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"Identifying who, when and where is probably the real problem,” said Michael Romano, NTCA senior vice president-policy. The FCC can’t tell now where the problems are arising -- “they can’t even get straight answers from the carriers” Romano said. “The FCC has basically had to throw up its hands” due to lack of data, he said. The upcoming order will “take lack of actual data off the table as a defense, to fix this problem,” he said: “It’s another diagnostic tool that hopefully will lead us to a solution” rather than simply waiting for a solution to “drop from the sky.”
Not everyone is happy with the likely reporting requirements. Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance members -- mid-sized carriers in predominantly rural areas -- worry that the FCC is poised to adopt broad and burdensome reporting and retention requirements, said Genny Morelli, ITTA president. It’s not a simple matter of hitting the ‘record’ button; major software upgrades will be required to provide the data the FCC wants, she told us.
Morelli worries the reporting and retention problems won’t let the FCC or industry “be able to identify, with any degree of specificity, the causes of the rural call completion problem,” she said. Before the FCC adopts new reporting rules, there should be “rigorous third-party administered transparent testing to determine what the causes of the problem are,” she said. “Then we can talk about what makes sense in terms of data collection.”
In case studies by HyperCube, a frequent conclusion for poor call completion was the lack of adequate facilities near the RLEC tandem, said Doug Davis, executive vice president of the parent of the company that sells tandem interconnection services to wireline, wireless, cable and VoIP providers. Poor staffing and lack of trust at small telcos compounded the problem, Davis said. When calling one RLEC, Davis couldn’t get anyone from the engineering department to talk to him until he called back and “said I was from AT&T and I got right through,” he said: Even then, “this poor guy, he couldn’t help me if he wanted to.” In another case study, “I tried the AT&T trick with them, it didn’t even work,” he said.
The real culprits in the call completion problem probably aren’t the initial long-distance providers, but the small companies in the middle running open source software with not enough resources, panelists said. The FCC will “never see these guys,” Romano said. Ultimately, Romano and Morelli told us, the FCC will be able to make real progress on call completion troubles only by requiring intermediate carriers to report.
Ensuring calls get connected could mean the difference between life and death, Romano said. “It’s only a matter of time before there’s a real tragedy out there.” There have been some “close calls” with mountain rescue teams not being dispatched, and public safety answering point (PSAP) dispatchers needing to call ambulance companies via wireless phones because their long-distance calls won’t connect, Romano said. “This is a canary in the coal mine for the IP evolution,” Romano said: Such breakdowns are “demonstrative of what can happen if you don’t have rules of the road in the new world.”
With the upcoming implementation of next-generation 911, which relies on an Internet Protocol network to deliver voice and data to the PSAP, call completion becomes even more crucial, said Greg Rogers, deputy general counsel at Bandwidth.com. It’s important to stop finger-pointing, and figure out “holistically” what the issues are, Rogers said.