Wireless Carriers Pressing FCC to Approve Data Roaming Mandate
Data roaming is not just a competitive issue but also directly affects consumers, a group of wireless carriers pushing for a data roaming mandate said Thursday. During a press conference, executives with Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and other competitors to AT&T and Verizon Wireless called for action at the commission’s April 7 meeting on a data roaming order. It remains unclear when Chairman Julius Genachowski will ask for a vote on an order called for in the National Broadband Plan (CD March 9 p2).
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"The expectation was something would happen, frankly, at the end of last year on data roaming,” said T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham. “Our major roaming partner is AT&T. We do not have a 3G roaming agreement with AT&T.” Ham said with industry consolidation and the nation’s two biggest carriers buying many of their competitors, all GSM carriers depend on AT&T for roaming and all CDMA carriers on Verizon. “For T-Mobile, AT&T is a monopoly,” she said. “For a lot of these guys they have the similar problem with Verizon.”
"It’s a basic consumer issue because the expectation of consumers is their smartphone is going to work wherever they're going to go,” said Sprint Vice President Charles McKee. “Data is not just an abstraction for consumers now [that] they use it every day, and in fact they rely upon it more and more in place of voice."
Russ Merbeth, vice president at Cricket, said data roaming is also a competitive issues. “It’s hard for a company to conceive of buying spectrum from the government and then not being able to fully utilize the benefits of holding that spectrum … because you can’t interconnect with networks necessary to make sure that your customers have a seamless experience."
Rural Cellular Association President Steve Berry noted that 135 years ago Thursday, Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call. “We're still looking for full connectivity,” he said. “There comes a time when you have to act and I think the time is here.” Berry said that President Barack Obama’s goal of getting high-speed broadband to 98 percent of the U.S. population won’t happen without data roaming. “Data roaming means jobs,” he said. “The White House seems to have gotten the message. We've met with them several times.” Berry also said data roaming has become a “matter of survival” for many smaller carriers.
The Rural Telecommunications Group said in a statement that many of its members are very small and that “AT&T and Verizon tend to avoid serving … rural areas unless there is an Interstate highway running through them.” “Without the assurance of fair and equitable data roaming agreements, small and rural wireless carriers cannot move forward with committing the capital necessary to implement 3G or 4G data services."
The carrier officials said the FCC has a full record to make a decision in favor of data roaming. “We think the record is very strong and is at least as strong if not stronger” than the record the FCC cited in imposing a voice roaming mandate,” Ham said. “We've provided a huge amount of data to the FCC,” Berry said. “If they still want more data I suggest that they have the authority to ask everyone in the telecom world to provide roaming agreements to the FCC” on a confidential basis. “Let them decide whether the market is a failure or not,” he said. “We think we're in a market failure."
The carrier officials said that imposing new regulation is justified in this case. Genachowski recently instructed FCC staff to follow a directive from the administration requiring a careful examination of new regulation (CD Feb 7 p1).
"This is a group of carriers. You talk to our CEOs and none of them think that regulation is the greatest thing on earth,” McKee said. “But there is a role that every agency must play to ensure that there is a competitive industry. What we're talking about here is survival of a competitive industry."
T-Mobile Senior Vice President Tom Sugrue said that the roaming market is essentially a monopoly. “It’s a classic fact pattern,” he said. “The commission should get involved despite whatever the president said about regulation.”
AT&T and Verizon have both made numerous filings at the FCC contending that despite complaints they are actively negotiating data roaming agreements with smaller competitors. T-Mobile “already has a data roaming agreement with AT&T that allows T-Mobile to roam on AT&T’s 2/2.5G networks,” AT&T said in a recent filing. “The parties have had data roaming agreements in place for many years, despite the absence of any regulatory compulsion.” AT&T added, “As the full record of this proceeding now makes clear, the question pending before the Commission is no longer whether broadband data roaming is available -- it is.”