There is a critical need for Congress or the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) to clarify that all wireless carriers should be obligated to enter into automatic roaming agreements on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.

• Roaming occurs when the subscriber of one wireless carrier utilizes the facilities of another wireless carrier with which the subscriber has no direct, pre-existing service relationship to place an outgoing call, to receive an incoming call, or to continue an in-progress call.

 

• Roaming can be done "manually," in which a customer establishes a temporary relationship with the host carrier usually by providing a credit card number, or "automatically," in which the customer  does nothing more than turn on her telephone.  Automatic roaming requires a pre-existing contractual agreement between the host and home carriers.

 

• Because manual roaming is so cumbersome, for at least the past decade, automatic roaming agreements have been the key component for enabling customers to travel into distant markets.

 

• Access to roaming is particularly critical to consumers who are underserved or who live in rural areas.

 

• Ensuring consumers have near ubiquitous access to roaming services is in the public interest.

Major mergers in the wireless industry over the past several years have yielded fewer choices of roaming partners for small, rural and regional home carriers and their customers.

 

• Consumers' ability to roam also has been limited because they can only roam on networks that use the same technical standard (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN) as the home carrier.

 

• In many local wireless markets, because of the two factors listed above, the only choices of roaming partner for a small, rural or regional wireless carrier are the nationwide supercarriers. 

  

• The resultant supercarrier “duopolies” have allowed the nation’s largest wireless providers to name their prices and terms for roaming service, in many cases at wholesale rates that are inflated by orders of magnitude over the supercarriers’ costs, their own charges to their affiliates, and even what they charge their own customers for roaming at retail.
  
• Unreasonable and discriminatory roaming practices by the largest wireless carriers have a particularly detrimental impact for customers of flat-rate services.  A huge number of wireless customers are underserved by the large carriers, and inflated roaming prices cause such customers to make a very difficult choice -- they either pay more for roaming or leave the smaller service provider altogether to gain access to roaming service – meaning that they pay more for wireless service overall. 
   
• While many aspects of wireless service are competitive, the current environment for automatic roaming services is not.  It stifles consumer choice and competition, harms underserved communities and makes wireless service unnecessarily more expensive.

 

• The FCC has been examining the issue since 1996 but to date has not intervened to address it.  Since then, problems with roaming have grown far worse.

 

• The imposition of an automatic roaming obligation for all carriers is needed now.  Congress has the opportunity to help customers – constituents – obtain access to roaming services in both rural and urban areas on fair and nondiscriminatory terms.

 

• Congress or the FCC should (i) expressly mandate that all carriers provide other carriers’ subscribers with automatic roaming capability if the subscribers are using mobile equipment that is technically compatible with the carrier’s network; and, (ii) mandate that automatic roaming rates, terms and conditions be just, reasonable and non-discriminatory.