FCC Imposes VoIP Discontinuance and Portability Rules

The past month the FCC (News - Alert) issued two orders of significance to VoIP providers. First, the FCC voted to adopt a Report and Order on service discontinuation requirements. Citing the need to further enhance consumer protections, VoIP providers will now be required to adhere to the FCC’s existing discontinuation rules that apply to non-dominant common carriers. The FCC’s current rules require non-dominant domestic carriers to provide notice to customers at least 30 days prior to the discontinuance, inform certain state authorities of the discontinuation, and obtain prior FCC approval before undertaking the service disruption.

In their remarks, the Commissioners described this requirement as minimally burdensome on the industry, and intended to prevent abrupt service disruptions, advance consumer protection, and enhance public safety by reducing instances where consumers lose access to 911 services.

In the second item, the Commission adopted a Report and Order on the local number portability porting interval for wireline-to-wireline and intermodal simple port requests. The Commissioners voted to reduce the porting interval from four business days to one business day for simple ports. This requirement applies to all service providers currently subject to the Commission’s porting rules (including VoIP providers). The Commission will ask the North American Numbering Council (NANC) to draft an updated porting process “flow” to account for the reduced timeframe. The FCC also released a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to refresh the record on how to further improve the porting process, and how to build on the new one business day porting interval.

William B. Wilhelm (News - Alert) is a partner in the law firm of Bingham McCutchen LLP. For more information please visit them online at www.bingham.com. The preceding represents the views of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Bingham McCutchen LLP or its clients.

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