Article 3MZDM FCC Reaches $40 Million Settlement with T-Mobile on Rural Call Completion Issues

FCC Reaches $40 Million Settlement with T-Mobile on Rural Call Completion Issues

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FHH Law
from CommLawBlog on (#3MZDM)
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Callers placing long distance calls to rural areas have, at times, experienced difficulties in having their calls go through. This occurs most often in rural areas where the costs incurred by long distance providers have generally been higher than in non-rural areas. In 2012, the FCC issued a declaratory ruling which determined that carriers that knew, or should have known, that calls were not being completed to rural areas (and failed to correct the problem) could be liable for violating Section 201 of the Communications Act. This decision also applied to calls that were being degraded by the carrier (or by intermediate or other entities acting for or employed by the carrier). In 2013, the FCC issued a follow-up order prohibiting carriers from sending an audible ringtone to a calling party to make them believe that a phone call made to a rural area was ringing at the receiving end, when the call had not actually gone through.

Fast forward to 2016 when the FCC began receiving complaints from three rural telephone companies in Wisconsin that T-Mobile customers could not complete calls to customers served by those rural phone companies. Many complaints reported that callers heard ringtones on calls that failed to reach rural customers. T-Mobile investigated the complaints and reported to the FCC that the connection problems were due to the involvement of an intermediate carrier and that all the complaints had been resolved. However, T-Mobile did not address the ringtone issue raised by some of the complaints.

After T-Mobile's response, the FCC received several additional complaints regarding call completion and ringtone issues. As a result, the FCC issued a letter of inquiry (LOI) to investigate the matter further. In response to the LOI and a supplemental LOI, T-Mobile reported that in 2007 it began using servers that included a "Local Ring Back Tone" (LRBT) for calls from customers that took more than a predetermined amount of time to complete. T"Mobile further reported that in 2013, as it migrated to different servers, that the company began using its LRBT protocol only for the out-of-network calls from its customers that were routed via Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks. T"Mobile continued its practice of using LRBT on such calls after the FCC rules that prohibited the practice went into effect. The FCC determined that T-Mobile's use of LRBT likely caused callers to receive false ringtones for hundreds of millions of calls each year.

In order to end the FCC's investigation into T-Mobile's alleged violation of rural call completion and ringtone rules, T-Mobile entered into a consent decree to pay a $40 million civil penalty and to undertake other measures to ensure compliance with the FCC's rural call completion and ringtone rules. A full copy of the consent decree can be found here. Clearly, the FCC takes the rural call completion and LRBT issue very seriously, and the FCC on Tuesday, April 17 voted to approve an Order and Notice of Further Proposed Rulemaking to continue to address rural completion issues. Carriers should review their procedures and third-party relationships to confirm that rural call completion problems and LRBT are not occurring to avoid complaints and resulting inquiries from the FCC, especially since the draft order requires carriers to monitor the performance of the intermediate providers to which they are connected.

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