FCC rescinds rule requiring wireless area coverage maps

The FCC has determined that it is no longer necessary to require cellular carriers to provide rate and coverage information for their service areas, primarily because market pressures will force them to do so anyway.

The commission noted that digital specialized mobile radio operators and PCS carriers such as Sprint and Nextel were exempt from the requirement, but have been issuing this information all along, “presumably because consumers demand [it],” said the commission in its order. The FCC said it expects analog carriers to continue making the information available absent the rule while marketing their services in an ultra-competitive environment in which as many as seven wireless providers compete in the same geographic market.

A spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association said the decision likely would have little impact on consumers, because the coverage maps are never entirely accurate.

“Because of the enormous growth by the carriers, we build something like 55 towers every day as an industry,” he said. “And the coverage areas depend on everything from sunspots to the weather to the seasons.”

However, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in a prepared statement that coverage maps are critical for consumers, because they indicate where they can use their phone and give them some sense as to the size of their monthly bill. For rural customers, such information can be the difference between life and death, because the information “allows them to determine where 911 calls will go through and where their signal will never be heard,” said Copps.

Copps fears that without the requirement, carriers with the worst service areas will be able to “mask their inferiority” by not making coverage maps available.

“Unsophisticated consumers may assume to their detriment that since the carrier provides them with no coverage map that coverage exists everywhere,” Copps said. “Competition and consumers will suffer.”