On March 1, 2007, the FCC ruled in favor of a petition filed by Time Warner Communicationswhich establishes that local exchanges cannot deny access to wholesale telecommunications operators (TWC) to provide services and exchange traffic, including voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
The decision overturned rulings in South Carolina and Nebraska that allowed local rural exchanges to deny access to wholesale carriers, arguing that the wholesale providers were not true telecommunications providers because they do not offer services directly to the public. interconnect with incumbent LECs…are inconsistent with the Act and Commission precedent and would thwart the development of competition and broadband deployment.”
In another somewhat related request, Skype VoIP Provider has asked the FCC to apply the 1968 Carterphone decision to the cell phone industry, effectively forcing cell phone companies to allow external devices and applications to connect to their network.
Tea carterphone ruling determined at that point that AT&T’s phone network stopped at the phone jack, ending a monopoly on user hardware and spurring a massive influx of new gadgets and technological innovations to the market.
Skype’s petition opens a whole new can of worms for the US cell phone industry, bringing them to the forefront of the grassroots debate on net neutrality. In his article, Dr. Tim Wu details techniques used by wireless carriers Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile to limit consumer access to devices and applications such as Wi-Fi, VoIP, Internet browsing and more.
Cell phone companies in the US not only control the public airwaves entrusted to them, but also sell the equipment used to connect to their networks, just as AT&T did before the Carterphone ruling. . They control access to their networks by disabling SIM card chip in the phones they sell, effectively locking it out to the network, or by requiring cell phones to be registered to the carrier’s network via their Electronic Serial Number (ESN).
Strict control of services allowed on US cellular networks has stifled developers and prevented the development of useful applications, severely limiting competition and consumer choice. VoIP over Wi-Fi connections, advanced GPS characteristics, Bluetooth wireless capabilities, and the development of advanced SMS The apps are just a few of the technologies that have at one point or another been stymied by the US cellular industry.
By ruling in favor of Time Warner, the FCC sided with the bigwigs, and with good reason. Consumers should be able to choose from a wide variety of applications, including VoIP, if technologically feasible. To be denied that by a service provider, simply because it doesn’t benefit the carrier, is not only uncompetitive, but un-American in some ways.
Skype also asked the FCC in its petition to consider a method of creating transparent and neutral standards in the cellular industry, perhaps something like the IEEE standards committee that has worked so well for wireless networks. Sounds great! Developers and device manufacturers could work together to foster competition and technological innovation, ultimately with enormous benefit to the consumer.
This is obviously not something the US cellular industry would want, and it would undoubtedly marshal all of its considerable resources in opposition. A project of this magnitude would also be a huge undertaking for the FCC, and could possibly lead to another layer of bureaucracy.
If indeed the FCC’s mission is to encourage competition, new technologies and protect consumer rights as implied by TWC’s decision, then there is a golden opportunity for them to do just that in the little Skype petition. As guardian of people’s communication systems and public airwaves, applying Carterphone’s principles equally to all players in the telecommunications industry would, at least to me, seem like a no-brainer.