ATIS Warns FCC Against TTY Backward Compatibility Requirement
The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, CTIA and the National Emergency Number Association jointly warned the FCC against mandating backward compatibility for text telephone devices, for nonemergency calls, as it pushes forward on the TTY to real-time text (RTT) transition.…
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Representatives of the groups reported on a meeting with FCC staff working on the issue. The FCC approved an NPRM in April on the transition (see 1604280055). Transcoder overloading is a real threat, the groups said. “Representatives from ATIS explained that, when RTT-enabled phones are configured to accommodate all incoming calls from the circuit switched network as TTY calls, the network must reserve an RTT to TTY transcoder in case it may be needed for the call (i.e., a party activates an RTT session),” the filing said. “Otherwise, a transcoder may not be assigned and calls that begin as voice calls will not be able to transition to an RTT session. However, if an RTT call is initiated as RTT, ATIS noted that the transcoder overloading issue is less of a problem as normal traffic engineering practices can be applied.” ATIS said the backward compatibility requirement proposed by the FCC “could have a significant impact on the industry and could require the industry to upgrade all transcoders to support RTT, or to develop more specific transcoding resourcing with the ability to assign instantaneously.” The filing was in docket 16-145.