In an article on AT&T’s internet website, Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s major government vice chairman of outside and legal events, said his enterprise was also “grateful” the fact that the FCC had settled its ask for a covenant.
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AT&T on Tuesday said it has received permission from the FCC that will allow it to offer its customers Wi-Fi calling.
Now that the AT&T acquired the privilege to delay a TTY service until December 31, 2017 according to the waiver, the company will now launch its anticipated Wi-Fi calling in the near future.
T-Mobile enabled Wi-Fi calling on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus a few time ago, and Sprint recently turned on the service as well.
For decades, the agency has required telecom and companies that provide communication services to support TTY, which lets people communicate via text. AT&T says that it didn’t use TTY because it was outdated and RTT was simply better in every way.
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The move also does not affect wireline IP-based services or non-IP-based wireless services, so consumers who rely on TTYs for access via their home and business connections will not lose service, the FCC said. As for Sprint and T-Mobile, the FCC seems content on ignoring their past transgressions as they’ve simply invited them to apply for a similar waiver form to continue offering their WiFi calling service uninterrupted. “This is exactly what we meant when our letter spoke of concerns about asymmetric regulation”. “We have no knowledge of the network configuration or planned service offerings that drove AT&T to seek the requested waiver”. Footnotes within the waiver petition approval document indicate that TTY usage is declining “by approximately 10 percent each year”, so AT&T’s insistence that Sprint and T-Mobile be penalized for not already seeking their own waivers can be seen as nothing short of spiteful. Although such features were widely available on platforms like Windows and Android, the feature came to the forefront only when Apple endorsed it.
