How Did I Miss This?
ByThursday I met with the FCC Enforcement Bureau and learned something I never previously understood. If all the rest of you understood this, please don’t hurt my feelings by telling me – there are people out there who consider me one of the experts.
For a long time many of us have complained that the FCC won’t enforce the tariff. “Why don’t they prevent companies from using fraudulent LOAs to NASC numbers when they are about to go spare? Or, why don’t they enforce porting rules?” we’d ask. Well, today Richard Hindman, the FCC Division Chief, Telecommunications, explained why. The responsibility to police the tariff lies with the entity that files the tariff; in this case SMS/800, Inc, the board that consists of the three Bell Operating Companies (BOCs). It appears that all these years the way to manage these issues was for the BOCs to take away the RespOrg’s access to SMS.
I know there are gray areas that are difficult to handle and maybe fear of lawsuits was why they didn’t enforce what they could have, but our $.0966 per number per month pays for their lawyer! Maybe some of you would have balked with paying $.0976 but think of the savings to be had if some ports didn’t take days of calling, faxing and re-faxing to finally succeed in getting the number to where the customer wanted it. For eighteen years I have been paying a staff member to come in every day to contact every RespOrg with a late port, followed by paying a management person to follow up when that doesn’t get results. All this time and money down the drain when there was a fix to this. That doesn’t even touch the amount of money that has been lost by the companies that should have had the revenue from these numbers that got stuck in porting!
Now I’m not proposing that every time a RespOrg releases a number a day late their SMS access should be removed forever, but for the ones, and we all know who you are, that never seem to get the fax or never respond to escalation requests, maybe discovering their SMS access has been denied would get their attention.
So what can the FCC enforce? …to be continued.
