IP Transition Means Changes and Uncertainties for Regulators

The FCC order presumed 911 would work well during the trials, but what if it doesn’t, asked Hinton, a management analyst at the D.C. PSC. “Will you just keep a tally?” he asked Kris Monteith, acting FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau chief. “Or will you seek to address the individual problem with the consumer?” Monteith said the FCC now tries to help consumers with complaints and presumed it still would. She reminded the NARUC Staff Subcommittee on Telecom that the FCC ruling only invited companies to propose trials. Some of the details would be left to be fleshed out when public comments are gathered for specific proposed trials, said Monteith.

Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said the FCC is already under a lot of stress dealing with the complaints. Virginia State Corporation Commission Communications Division Deputy Director Katie Cummings said the trials don’t change that the state has no jurisdiction over VoIP and forwards complaints to the FCC. Most complaints her office get are about copper-based phone service, she said. Sandra Sloane, director of the New York State Public Service Commission’s Office of Consumer Services, took comfort in language contained in the order, which talked about the FCC consulting with the states.

The order also said the presumption during the trials is that state laws would apply, although companies could ask the FCC for a waiver. That led others like Minnesota Public Utilities Commission Chairwoman Beverly Jones Heyding to tell us that “the FCC is committing to consulting with the State regulatory bodies in the jurisdictions where these experiments would take place. And the FCC will undertake these experiments with the presumption that the telecommunications carrier proposing an experiment has complied with all applicable state laws unless the carrier rebuts that presumption and can establish that those laws should be preempted. In both of these principles, the FCC makes clear that the authority of the State regulatory body is significant and valuable and should be maintained unless there is a clear reason not to do so."

Trials or not, the transitions are happening, and speakers said changes are coming for consumers and regulators. NeuStar Senior Policy Advisor Brent Struthers envisioned a day when consumers might get phone numbers from a website as people do now for domain names, and then buy service using the number. They would keep those numbers for life like Social Security numbers, he said Saturday at a panel on the future of phone numbers. For states, pressure would ease conserving numbers within area codes, he said.

The transition to IP is bringing changes for such basics of traditional phone services as reaching 911, said Matthew Gerst, CTIA director-state regulatory & external affairs. He said 80 percent of individuals with disabilities use some sort of wireless device. Some carriers are moving toward a May 15 deadline to begin allowing users to send text messages to 911 operations, and the FCC has proposed a rule to require all other wireless providers do the same by the end of the year.

Jamie Barnett, director of the Find Me 911 Coalition, said the world is changing. There were 240 million 911 calls last year, he said, and 68 percent were made from cellphones. A question is how well authorities will be able to find the location of an incident, especially when the 911 calls are made from indoors, he said. Another concern for regulators is potential for IP-based 911 calls to be hacked, said Barnett. Montana authorities saw the problems hackers could cause last February, he said. Someone hacked into a TV station’s emergency alert system and broadcast a seemingly official sounding warning that zombies were rising from the dead and attacking the living (CD Feb 14 p8). -- Kery Murakami (kmurakami@warren-news.com)