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Industry Urges FCC to Pre-Empt Discriminatory State, Local 911 Laws

Big telecom carriers urged the FCC to pre-empt state and local 911 laws “that, on their face or in application, discriminate against VoIP customers as compared to customers buying non-VoIP wireline services.” The FCC may pre-empt those policies using 47…

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U.S. Code Section 615a-1(f)(1), said AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier Communications, Windstream, Comcast, NCTA and USTelecom in meetings June 5 with the Wireline and Public Safety bureaus, per a filing posted Monday in docket 19-44. They said to pre-empt when state or local law “sets a higher per unit VoIP 911 charge than the per unit 911 charge for non-VoIP wireline services,” or if the state or locality “caps the total number of 911 charges due each month from customers buying non-VoIP wireline services, but sets a higher cap -- or sets no cap at all -- on the number of 911 charges due each month from customers buying VoIP services.” Pre-empt when the nonfederal government “calculates the number of 911 charges due from customers buying non-VoIP wireline services based on the number of simultaneous calls to the [public switched telephone network] PSTN (including 911) those customers can place, but calculates the number of 911 charges due from customers buying VoIP service based on their assigned or active telephone numbers, even if the customers cannot simultaneously place calls to the PSTN (including 911) using all those telephone numbers,” said the industry interests: Such findings would help resolve 911 fee lawsuits including in Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.