• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

FCC Wants Answers from AT&T Wireless on Slow Porting Service

Posted on: Friday, 5 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Dec. 5--Appeals court turns down bid to halt phone-number switches A second technical glitch at AT&T Wireless in as many months has prompted the Federal Communications Commission this time to start asking questions.

In a letter sent yesterday, the FCC asked the Redmond company to respond to problems it had in complying with a new federal law that allows wireless customers to take their cellphone numbers with them when switching carriers.

"Over the past few days, we have received a number of complaints from consumers and carriers, and have noted recent press accounts, indicating that a porting backlog exists for ports from AT&T Wireless to other carriers," wrote John Muleta, the FCC's chief wireless official.

The company admitted that it is having a harder time than competitors in porting, or transferring, existing numbers to a customer's new carrier and that it has been unable to do so on the first try more than 60 percent of the time. On average, the industry has been able to port numbers half of the time on the first try.

The problems come after the company experienced difficulties last month in upgrading or adding customers to a new data-transmission system it recently had launched.

An FCC spokeswoman said AT&T Wireless was the only carrier it asked to send information, by Wednesday, regarding its porting practices. She said based on media reports and information from carriers and consumers, "AT&T's porting interval seems significantly longer."

"We obviously will respond completely and in a timely fashion (to the FCC)," said Mark Siegel, AT&T Wireless' spokesman. "We continue to work aggressively to clear up and solve the problems we have been encountering with number portability."

Janee Briesemeister, a campaign director for a project being directed by the Consumers Union, said AT&T Wireless is receiving a lot of complaints for a company ranked No. 3 in the number of subscribers. Her organization has been tracing complaints at www.escapecellhell.org.

Of the 150 e-mails she received yesterday afternoon, Briesemeister said 40 percent involved customers trying to leave AT&T Wireless for another carrier. "We are hearing complaints about all the companies, but we are hearing a disproportionate (number) about AT&T," she said.

One e-mail was from a customer who was still waiting to port his number since Nov. 24, the day the new law took effect. Briesemeister said that when that person called to check up on the status, he was on hold for 3 hours, 29 minutes.

In many cases, she said, the customers' old accounts have been canceled, while in other situations the subscribers still have their old phone while they wait for the new phone to activate. "There's a lot of people walking around with two phones," she said.

Portability, the term for transferring numbers to another service, was expected to be a painstaking process, one that the wireless industry had fought for years and had managed to delay three times. The fear among the carriers was for customer turnover, or churn, to increase when customers no longer had to go through the inconvenience of changing their phone number when they switched services.

However, early estimates seem to have overstated the scale to which customers would take advantage of the new law -- at least initially.

One projection was that 8.7 million of the 146 million U.S. cellphone subscribers were expected to switch on the first day of porting. Fewer than 100,000 customers actually did so, according to industry reports.

A spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless, the largest carrier, said every carrier is experiencing glitches and that customers are being told to expect porting to take one to two days.

"We are setting individual customer targets and assertively contacting customers if they take longer to port," said Georgia Taylor, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman in Bellevue.

AT&T Wireless' Siegel said his company is telling customers to expect a five-day wait.

"Consumers are finding that they can't port in intervals that are satisfactory," he said. "We are trying to improve that. The industry goal is 2 1/2 hours... We are trying not to overpromise during a situation like this. We are managing expectations so that people trust us."

Portability is the second technical issue AT&T Wireless has faced in the past two months. In November, computer problems plagued the carrier when it attempted to upgrade or add customers to new systems that support faster data transmission speeds.

"Can these guys do anything right?" asked Mark Hesse-Withbroe, a telecommunications analyst at U.S. Bancorp Asset Management, whose Minneapolis-based parent, U.S. Bancorp, owns 1.9 million AT&T Wireless shares. "There should be some accountability. That might restore some credibility."

Siegel said those kinks are almost completely straightened out and that it never affected very many people. Of its 11 million-plus subscribers, only 3 million can take advantage of the new system, and only those who were upgrading or making changes would have been affected, he said.

"I think that's an issue, that's absolutely unrelated to this," he said. "Credibility comes from being straight and to admitting to issues and doing the best to fix it, and that's what we are doing."

-----

To see more of The Seattle Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.seattletimes.com.

(c) 2003, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

AWE, VZ, VOD,

More News in this Category