Long Awaited Location-Accuracy Order Expected to Circulate Soon
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to circulate within the next few weeks a long-awaited order on location accuracy rules for wireless, based on proposals by AT&T and Verizon Wireless and incorporating changes sought in by T-Mobile, industry and FCC officials said. Last week, The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International (APCO) and the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) filed a letter at the commission endorsing the tweaks sought in a June 16 letter by T-Mobile to AT&T’s proposal for GSM-based carriers. The Public Safety Bureau has started to brief eighth-floor officials on the order.
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In 2008, APCO and NENA submitted location-accuracy proposals with Verizon Wireless for CDMA and with AT&T for GSM. The FCC never acted on the proposals, but it did impose the rules as conditions in approving Verizon Wireless’s acquisition of Alltel and the Sprint Nextel-Clearwire partnership.
In the latest twist, T-Mobile sought changes addressing problems presented by conditions in rural areas. “For T-Mobile, the greatest challenge with respect to location accuracy has been in rural areas where sites are sparsely deployed and/or located along traffic corridors, which T-Mobile is addressing through its ongoing transition to A-GPS technology,” the carrier said. T-Mobile believes “it can meet the AT&T Proposal’s standard of 300 [meters] for 90% of calls in 85% of counties, by the end of the 8th year after the effective date of the rules (Benchmark 4), provided that this standard applies only to accuracy measurements of outdoor calls,” the carrier said. “T-Mobile understands that this was the assumption underlying AT&T’s proposal.”
T-Mobile also sought tweaks to the three intermediate benchmarks proposed by AT&T. For example, when using network-based measurements as a component of the county-level compliance calculation, T-Mobile said, a county should be excluded from calculations if it has fewer than three cell sites. T-Mobile’s full filing is at http://bit.ly/cF8KlI.
"APCO and NENA believe that there should be no further delay in the resolution of this important public safety issue,” the associations said in a letter last week. “Therefore, we do not object to T-Mobile’s proposed modifications, and we strongly urge the Commission to proceed expeditiously to adopt the necessary orders to implement the modified proposal.”