In a filing Thurs. at the U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., CTIA disputed...

a separate petition for mandamus filed by Alltel, AT&T Wireless and Cingular seeking a stay on LNP obligations, contending federal law exempted mobile operators from having to port numbers (CD Oct 30 p10). A separate mandamus petition by CTIA remains pending before the court. The CTIA asked that the agency be compelled to resolve unanswered questions on implementing LNP. Among the arguments raised by the FCC at the D.C. Circuit in opposition to CTIA’s request was that it wasn’t obligated to resolve the CTIA petitions by a specific statutory deadline, the issues didn’t have to be resolved before Nov. 24 for wireless LNP to happen on that date, and the agency’s resources were being strained by several other key issues. As for the absence of a statutory deadline for responding to CTIA’s petitions, the group said: “The absence of such a deadline is irrelevant because this case is not about whether the FCC has unreasonably delayed responding to CTIA’s petitions. Rather, the crux of this case is whether the FCC has intolerably failed to resolve number portability implementation issues that have been pending before the Commission for 6 years.” CTIA told the court it wasn’t sufficient that the Commission had issued guidance on wireless-to-wireless porting while allowing wireline-to-wireless implementation issues to remain outstanding. “Claiming that LNP can go forward with only partial guidance is thus only partially correct,” CTIA said. “By failing to issue wireline-wireline guidance, the FCC has ensured that intermodal LNP will not be realized by the November 24, 2003, deadline. Absent such porting, and the consumer benefits the FCC anticipates from the increased competition it expects LNP to produce, the substantial costs and burdens of LNP cannot be justified.”