As most of you know, it is against federal regulations to sell a toll-free number.  But, as we also know, it is done all the time.  The North American Numbering Committee (NANC) reviewed a white paper last year which suggested that the industry and the government should look at the marketability of toll-free numbers and develop a model similar the “Australian model”.  In Australia, “good” numbers are auctioned by the government in a process somewhat like the U.S. auction of spectrum.

Last week I met with Congressman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) in his DC office.  Congressman Walden is the chairman of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, co-sponsor of the FCC Process Reform Act of 2011 and my Congressman.  We were joined Ray Baum, a Senior Policy Advisor to the Congressman and David Redl and Nick Degani, staff to the Communications and Technology committee.  I had gone to the meeting hoping, at most, to come away with the Congressman understanding what I was talking about.  Instead, I was delighted to have a lively discussion about the advantages that the Australian model would allow.   

My major point in the discussion was that in the last year the FCC Enforcement Bureau has spent taxpayer time and money trying to go after the companies that buy and sell toll-free numbers.  Selling these numbers is against the Federal Regulations but you can still go on e-bay and buy a number.  For companies like ATL, companies that follow the rules, this presents a distinct competitive disadvantage.  We follow the rules while others are allowed to disobey them openly and with no negative impact.  It is time to recognize that toll-free numbers have a market value and that the current regulations drive a black market. 

The current regulations exist because in the late 1980’s, when toll-free portability was being designed, the industry was very different.  We (I was one of that team) were in a world where no toll-free number had ever been ported, competition in long distance was brand new and local competition was not even imagined.  We were envisioning just a handful of RespOrgs.  The world is different now.  The regulators need to catch up with all that has dramatically changed our industry.  And, we need to help them bring all the governing rules and regulations up to date.

I am hoping to have some equally lively discussions with NANC and the industry.  And, I will be talking more with the Congressman and his staff.  Let me know if you would like to be part of the discussion.

Since the beginning, I have been on the fence regarding the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. Having gone through divestiture and the breakup of the Bell System, because it was a monopoly and prevented other companies from competing in the telecommunications industry, it appeared to me at every merger juncture that the FCC was giving the go-ahead to “put Humpty Dumpty back together again!” Then it seemed finally push back in the industry, the legislative issues involved and the many lawsuits, AT&T withdrew from the deal. I guess drawing the line somewhere was necessary, even if it seemed too little too late. From my perspective, the whole thing was a colossal waste of time and energy for government resources and a HUGE ($4B) moneymaker for Deutsche Telecom and their attorneys!

Does anyone have experience with the IQPC Call Center Conference.  I have never been to one and was considering going to the one In January in Orlando, but wanted to find out if anyone knows anything about it.  ATL has Call Center customers for our multi-carrier disaster recovery, but I am surprised how many times when I bring up the subject with a prospect they are totally unaware of it.  I made a request last year to speak at the IQPC Conference, but I am not sure they understood what ATL does.

All RespOrgs protect errors in porting using reject codes.  But some, and yes they are the usual suspects, use them to slow valid rejects.  Many years ago the Toll-Free Guidelines put out a set of reject codes that were allowed by industry agreement.  The Guidelines are managed by a national industry group called the SMS Number Administration Committee (SANC), an ATIS Committee.  I am a member of that committee and soon we will be releasing a new version of the Guidelines.  In these new guidelines, two reject codes will be deleted and others will be better defined.

It is very unfortunate that the deletions are needed due to abuse by a few.  “Other” is being deleted because, instead of it being used for very unusual circumstances, it has become the answer for RespOrgs who want to use rejects like, “Need Bill Copy.”  “Need Bill Copy” is NOT a reject code.  It is each RespOrg’s responsibility to manage both its internal information and its agents to be able to verify by toll-free number.  However, requiring bill copies has become a way to shirk that responsibility and delay valid ports.  The tariff allows two days to respond to a port, so if it is a name/number mismatch or address mismatch, the reject should happen within that two-day timeframe.

The other code being deleted is “Unsatisfactory Business Relationship.”  This was not a reject code in the original Guidelines, but sometime before 1997 when the last Guidelines were released, Allnet, who became Global Crossing, convinced the SNAC to add it.  I personally thought it was great.  It was a way to alert another RespOrg that they were porting in a customer that hadn’t paid their last carrier.  The number still could be ported without the consent of the existing RespOrg, but it was at their risk.  ATL has not seen this abused much, but apparently other companies have seen it used as a delaying tactic, so it is going.

I have said this before and will be frustrated about it until I leave the industry to hang out on a sun-filled beach:  If the industry would just police the bad apples, the rest of us could continue using the tools we have.  Lack of policing means we all end up operating under rules that are less than perfect and it shouldn’t have to be that way.

“Net Neutrality” has long been an interest of mine and, in the past, I have written several blogs on the subject. I believe that the recent decision on this issue will have a huge impact on our industry in the future.

On September 22, 2011, the FCC received approval from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to adopt “net neutrality” rules based on the Commission’s Open Internet Order. These new rules go into effect on November 30, 2011. The rules are intended to “to preserve the Internet as an open platform for innovation, investment, job creation, economic growth, competition, and free expression.”

Under these new rules, fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose their network management practices, performance characteristics, and the terms and conditions of their broadband services. Broadband providers are precluded from blocking lawful content, applications, and services. This goes to the heart of last year’s Comcast lawsuit. Comcast’s suit contended that the content being blocked was for network utilization protections only.

There is no doubt that these new rules will set off a number of new lawsuits from companies that have opposed “net neutrality” rules.

Thanks to Miller Isar Inc’s Regulatory Review for this information. If you want to be added to their list contact Andrew Isar at 253-851-6700.

For years ATL Communications has been involved in quick recovery of toll-free traffic from localized network outages. Recently I was in a meeting talking about the issues around local-number porting in emergencies. I was surprised to see how many outages of this type there really are and how many lines are affected. The list below includes outages that affected local and long distance, including toll free.

All of us hear about the 250,000 lines out for more than 40 days after 9/11 or the 1.4 million after Hurricane Katrina. In disasters, such as those, we anticipate a large volume of lines will be affected and for a substantial period of time. But, there are a number of lesser occurrences happening every day. The chart below shows the number of occurrences and the time to repair for just two months of this year. This was compiled from trouble reports from several companies.

There are cost-effective ways to protect your toll-free traffic from the affects of these localized outages. We at ATL Communications can help devise a plan that works for you. Our next challenge is to develop a means of protecting the networks against outages of local traffic.

If you read my last blog and found it unbearably boring, don’t read this one since it is the “ … to be continued.” For those of you that are still with me, for toll-free services the FCC can enforce what is in the Code of Federal Regulations, Subpart D: Sections 52.101 through 52.111.

These sections refer to issues of hoarding, warehousing, and selling toll-free numbers. It’s a really short little part of The Code of Federal Regulations, but it is huge to the toll-free industry. The FCC Enforcement Bureau launched an investigation in 2010 which is focused on this little section. And, the truth of the matter is, most RespOrgs are guilty of violations to some extent. When I completed ATL’s response, I found six numbers (from the days when I owned a CLEC) that customers didn’t take with them when I sold the CLEC. We didn’t have an internal mechanism in place to alert us that we had a few numbers that had been turned off but not released back as “spare” in the national database. These weren’t numbers that spelled anything so no one ever asked us about them.

In reality, as was pointed out to me by the FCC in our meeting, ATL was guilty of hoarding because we had numbers with no usage and no customer. Will we get thousands of dollars in fines for these six numbers? I don’t know. 660 other companies probably didn’t think they would get fined $20,000 each for being late on one filing, but the FCC did just that.

In the meeting, I gained a real appreciation for how difficult it is for the FCC to determine who is wearing a Black Hat and who has on a White One. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I have great concern that the companies who really went out of their way to be white hat types will get treated just like the ones who the industry identified as black hats years ago.

There have been rumors that the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is going away but I think the rumor has become fact.  Recently the FCC’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC) told the FCC that it was ready to recommend a date for the PSTN sunset.  They based the date on studies that show that by 2018 only 6% of the population will be using landlines.  I personally am not ready to lose my landline connection and still think it is the gold standard.  But, let me relate a personal story.

I have a 20-year old son who has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and I don’t mean the often misdiagnosed sort of scatter-brained.  Tom and I know – we have seen the brain scans.  A cell phone for him is a problem because it is always lost, dead, stolen (?) or something else that makes it unavailable.  I got so tired of trying to reach him I decided to suggest a landline.  So I said, “Patrick, how about I get you a phone that plugs into the wall so you can always find it.”  His reply, and he wasn’t kidding, was, “What a great idea!”  I was on a roll so I also suggested that I get him a phone attached to the wall with a machine that will blink and that blinking means “your mother called”.  He thought that was a great idea, too.

A week later his number had been busy for more than a day so I went by his work and told him his phone was “off the hook”.  He didn’t know what I meant so I told him it meant “the top of the phone and the bottom of the phone were not united”.  He asked me if I had stopped by his house because “how else would I know that this was what had happened?”

Cute kid, but we have five kids between 18 and 28 and none of them has a landline.

Next blog, what does this mean to the FCC and the way we fund universal service?

Last week I went to New Orleans, with a couple of other interested parties, to meet with some of the leaders of the Local Number Portability (LNP) Working Group.  One of ATL’s customers, Telecom Recovery, a product manager from Neustar, and I have been discussing what options there might be for establishing a process to better manage local ports in emergencies, including carrier outages. Scott Mah, from Telecom Recovery, highlighted a recent carrier failure in Seattle that disrupted incoming calls to a number of organizations, including portions of the City of Seattle, Harborview Medical Center, and the University of Washington.  Impact during this extended outage could have been mitigated if it was possible to quickly port affected prefixes to alternate carrier facilities that were already in place at each of the sites. 

For years I have questioned why the LNP process was set up with no end-user customer control. I met with the committees planning local porting in the late 1990’s, but no one seemed interested in lessons learned in the decade of porting that had already taken place in toll-free calling.  There was, and still is, an insistence that there are no similarities between the two.  I am not an attorney but I think the FCC considers local numbers to be under end-user control in much the same way that end-user control is clear in toll-free.  The gentleman from Neustar calls this the “democratization” of local porting.

I am interested in your comments on this issue.  Is this a concern to you?

I recently invited my employees over to our house for dinner.  When one of the children couldn’t reach the table, I suggested getting the telephone book.  I thought all of us were raised using a telephone book (or multiple telephone books, if the child was really small) as a booster seat to enable the child to reach the table when eating.  My 20-something employees looked at me as if I were crazy.  Why did I need a telephone book?  Why?  None of them use telephone books as booster seats or to look up numbers – they use the internet so they don’t even readily know where their telephone book is!

This week I saw a blurb in Miller-Isar’s “Regulatory Review.”  If you don’t know Miller-Isar, you should.  It is a great option for outsourcing those pesky government filings and a lot of other things.  Anyway, the article said that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is allowing Verizon to quit automatically delivering White Page Telephone Books to their customers.  Verizon will monitor the directory assistance statistics to see if the change has any “adverse impacts to subscribers.”  I bet they will find that today’s subscriber’s, those that haven’t already gone to cell phones only, won’t even notice.

So here is your Insider Information hot stock tip – buy stock in booster seats!  There’s going to be a run on them.