Subject: [NEXTEL-1] FCC wants answers from AT&T Wireless on slow porting service

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 13:55:34 -0500

FCC wants answers from AT&T Wireless on slow porting service

By Tricia Duryee
Seattle Times Eastside business reporter

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 2½ 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."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2001807866&zsection_id=268448455&slug=wireless050&date=20031205

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