TMCnews Featured Article

There’s a fight coming in the telecom industry, and the two sides are already squaring up against one another. It involves voice over IP (VoIP) telephone service provider access to telephone numbers.

Currently, any company wanting to obtain phone numbers to assign to new customers must be certified in each state where numbers are needed. Companies such as Level 3 that have extensive certifications have built a whole line of business around selling phone numbers and other services to VoIP providers, according to TeleCompetitor.

But some VoIP providers would like to see this middleman cut out of the process, and have appealed to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to change the rules. The clamor began when popular Internet phone service Vonage (News - Alert) applied to the agency for a waiver to have direct access to telephone numbers to provide to new subscribers.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which represents the interests of state-level telecom regulators, not surprisingly sent a letter to the FCC (News - Alert) requesting that it not grant Vonage’s waiver request… at least, not without opening the process up to a comments period called a “notice of proposed rulemaking,” or NPRM. 

In the letter, the NARUC and others including the AARP and some consumer advocates note that, “Assigning telephone numbers to providers who are not State certificated telecommunications carriers undermines the congressionally established structure of the Telecom Act. State and Federal roles on consumer protection, interconnection, and number management are clearly defined in the Act specifically for ‘telecommunications carriers’, which would be circumvented by lack of a defined legal authority over providers that have chosen not to be ‘telecommunications carriers.’”

The letter concludes that allowing direct assignment of numbers to non-carriers would trigger a “race to the bottom” in the American communications market.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (News - Alert), on the other hand, has said that he believes that changing the phone number rule would create more VoIP service and increased competition, according to an article in Politico last month.

"Allowing VoIP providers to obtain telephone numbers directly, and not through intermediate providers, as is generally the case today, has the potential to fuel innovation and promote competition, at the same time we ensure calls are routed reliably and efficiently, protect public safety, and guard against exhaust of limited numbers," a commission official wrote in an e-mail obtained by Politico.