FCC Urged to Deny Neustar Rebid Petition, Pick New LNPA in 2014
Neustar petitions protesting the local number portability administrator selection process and seeking a rebid “are all merely attempts to game the process,” and the FCC should select Telcordia as the next LNPA, Telcordia wrote the FCC Friday, according to an ex parte filling. CTIA, USTelecom, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon pressed aides to commissioners Mike O’Rielly, Ajit Pai and Jessica Rosenworcel plus Wireline Bureau and General Counsel staff last week to confirm Telcordia.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
An attorney representing an entity pushing for Telcordia’s selection said those pressing for action are hoping the commission will confirm Telcordia’s selection in a vote on circulation this year. The deadline to put the item on the commission’s December meeting agenda passed Thursday. The FCC declined to comment Monday.
Fueling the push was last Friday’s comments deadline on two Neustar petitions from Feb. 12 and Oct. 22 challenging the selection process. The October petition for a declaratory ruling (see 1410230047) asked for a rebid of the contract and to allow it to continue serving as the LNPA in the process. “Further delay” in approving Telcordia would lead to an “enormous cost,” because any extension of Neustar’s current LNPA contract beyond the June 2015 expiration date “will automatically trigger a price escalation clause and will cost consumers over $40 million per month,” said CTIA’s ex parte notices filed and posted Thursday in docket 07-149. Michael Altschul, CTIA general counsel; B. Lynn Follansbee, USTelecom vice president-law and policy; William Brown, AT&T general attorney; Indra Chalk, T-Mobile principal corporate counsel; Tiki Gaugler, XO senior attorney-regulatory; Jeff Lanning, CenturyLink vice president-federal regulatory affairs; Charles McKee, Sprint vice president-government affairs; Ann Berkowitz, Verizon director-federal regulatory affairs, and Chris Miller, Verizon vice president-regulatory affairs, attended the meetings with commission aides and staff, the fillings said.
The group, in the meetings, urged action “by year-end” to allow affected providers “to proceed with the necessary logistical planning for a seamless and timely transition to prevent an avoidable, new cost of more than $1 million "per day from being passed on to the American public,” both filings said.
Neustar alleged in the October petition the North American Numbering Council and a working group violated federal transparency laws in NANC’s recommendation of Telcordia. That and the February petition are “designed to give [Neustar] another shot at retaining the numbering administrator’s contract, and should be denied, USTelecom said in a comment Friday, opposing both petitions. “Neustar’s petitions are irrelevant and unsubstantiated. All of the appropriate procedures for the selection process were followed in a fully vetted and transparent proceeding,” USTelecom said. “The process needs to move forward. The time is now for this proceeding to end.”
Neustar, in response to the meetings seeking a 2014 decision, said in a statement: “Once again the largest players are impatiently stamping their feet just as the FCC is seriously digging in to the many important issues raised by this botched process. The FCC can, and must, bring this process to a lawful conclusion to ensure a good outcome for the many constituencies involved.”
In its comment Friday, Neustar said the concerns it raised in the February petitions haven’t been addressed, and the “need for re-evaluation is more urgent now than it was in February.” Neustar said the request for proposal process and the NANC recommendation lack any evaluation of either how a transition to another LNPA would be implemented or what its cost and operational implications would be for the industry and consumers. The RFP process didn’t identify the impact changing LNPAs would have on “certain critical industry services currently being provided by the LNPA, including disaster recovery and emergency preparedness, ecosystem management, and handling of mass port requests from service providers for the purposes of network transformation,” said Neustar. It said the RFP process and the NANC recommendation neglected Neustar’s allegations that Telcordia does not meet neutrality standards because its parent company Ericsson has contracts with a number of wireless companies.
“The importance of the NPAC [Number Portability Administration Center] to the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure is undeniable and the value of a capable, experienced, and proven-reliable LNPA vendor is enormous,” Neustar’s Friday filing said. “The information in the record to date demonstrates only that the Commission lacks any basis for replacing the current reliable and robust system with an untested and unproven alternative.”