Rural carriers seek stay of wireless LNP order

Four rural exchange carriers—Central Texas Telephone Cooperative, Kaplan Telephone Company, Leaco Rural Telephone Cooperative and Valley Telephone Cooperative—filed a request this week with the Federal Communications Commission seeking a stay of the commission's October 7, 2003, wireless-to-wireless porting order. The carriers are concerned their customer relationships could be "irreparably damaged" because the order requires wireless carriers to port numbers across rate center boundaries in the absence of local interconnection arrangements. Accordingly, calls to wireless numbers ported outside of the rural carriers' service areas could only be completed by being transported on the toll network, they said. The result would be that customers would not be able to determine whether they were initiating local or toll calls, they said. In addition, dropped or interrupted calls would increase, as would "surprise" toll charges for calls to numbers that appear to be local, they said.