Draft Order Would Give One-Year Trial of Direct VoIP Access to Numbers
The FCC’s circulating draft order giving VoIP providers direct access to phone numbers contemplates a trial period of about a year, with conditions designed to evaluate the trials, said industry and agency officials. That’s in contrast with the blanket waiver Vonage has been seeking for the past several years, they said. Level 3 and Bandwidth.com, which have long warned about the potential harms of granting VoIP providers direct number access, said the proposed order poses “considerable risks.” A Wireline Bureau spokesman had no comment.
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An NPRM circulated along with the order looks at broader issues of access to numbers for VoIP providers, and asks about the appropriate transition period and protections against number exhaust issues (CD March 7 p2). It’s written so that, in theory, the NPRM could be completed before finishing the trial, said an agency official. The simultaneous nature of the trial and NPRM doesn’t sit well with Level 3 and Bandwidth.com, companies that urged in a meeting with an aide to Commissioner Ajit Pai last week that the commission first issue an NPRM seeking “appropriate” terms for a trial (http://bit.ly/14JUc1p).
The proposed “ad hoc” trial “does not appear to be structured in a manner that will be beneficial or relevant to an NPRM in this proceeding,” the CLECs said. As such, they said “the Commission stands to lose the ability to address IP interconnection and other transition issues comprehensively and holistically after notice and comment from all interested parties."
One can make an argument that a trial could inform the NPRM, said Michael Mooney, general counsel-regulatory policy at Level 3. The NPRM could then take the results of the trial and, based on that experience, seek comment on when and how non-carriers might be granted access to numbers, he told us. Alternatively, he said, one could argue that an NPRM would inform the trial. “What doesn’t seem to make logical sense to us is that you would do those things in parallel,” he said. “Because when you do them in parallel, it seems like neither can inform the other. So we don’t understand why the commission would want to do it that way."
"The idea of the trial is to inform the NPRM”, responded an FCC official. One point of the trial would be to help evaluate whether it’s feasible to grant VoIP providers direct access to numbers more generally, said another agency official.
A notice of inquiry also on circulation looks at the possibility of non-geographic numbering, theoretically delinking area codes from specific geographic locations, said an FCC official. An AT&T ex parte said it would be useful for the commission to consider, in its forthcoming NPRM, whether the geographic basis of numbers should be “eliminated or broadened” (http://bit.ly/14K1NwX).