AT&T Calls Out Competitors on TTY Service

“T-Mobile’s CEO is dodging the question posed in our letter to the FCC”, said AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi. AT&T says that at least part of the reason that its waiver is taking so long is because the FCC is considering an industry-wide waiver of the TTY rules rather than a waiver that applies to only AT&T. “Neither of those carriers has approached the FCC to request a waiver of the TTY rules” and are thus “offering those services in apparent violation of the Commission’s rules”.

As mentioned above, these companies didn’t request the permits for violating the FCC rule that says that all telecommunication services should have teletypewriter or TTY that lets speech and hearing impaired people communicate over phones, which is something yet not possible with Wi-Fi calling.

AT&T SVP James Cicconi complained today that Sprint and T-Mobile have started offering Wi-Fi calling without receiving the necessary green-light from the FCC.

“This past Friday, September 25, was the date on which AT&T meant to introduce Wi-Fi calling services in competition with other competitors in the market, namely T-Mobile and Sprint”, AT&T wrote in its filing. Thus, the letter, which points out that Sprint and T-Mobile don’t have waivers, but have gone on to offer the service anyway. It’s time the FCC proved them wrong.

Wi-Fi calling is a big feature, enabling high-quality voice calls over a Wi-Fi network, which can come in especially handy if you’re in a location with poor cell reception. AT&T suggests to the FCC that Real Time Text should be recognized as meeting requirements for the deaf while T-Mobile feels that RCS should be universally accepted. The groups praised AT&T’s efforts to advance RTT technology, saying that it will maintain the ability to transmit text character by character, “allowing for conversational, real-time communication”, but without suffering “the reliability and transmission issues that impact TTY when operating on an IP network”.

Both TTY and RTT offer support for the deaf and hard-of-hearing to conduct non-voice conversations, but AT&T’s RTT service wouldn’t be ready until 2016, leading to the carrier’s request for a temporary waiver from needing to implement TTY support until then. “TTYs also continue to play an important role by providing direct access to 9-1-1 emergency services”.