Phase II Waiver Denied

The FCC continues to handle Phase II waiver requests from cellular carriers, today denying a request from Nextel Partners to extend the deadline for 95% customer use by two years. The FCC had set a Dec. 31, 2005 deadine for having nearly all customers to have access to Phase II locating features. In this case, the FCC said rather sharply, “We find that Nextel Partners failed to take sufficient efforts in advance of the deadline to assure timely compliance, and has not committed to taking additional steps to ensure that it achieves compliance as quickly as possible.” The FCC called Nextel Partners’ penetration rate “poor” even after the deadline. In the Order the FCC set out Nextel Partners’ compliance back to 2001, and the company’s claim that its lower-than-average handset turn-over rate has lowered the A-GPS handset useage to 80.2% as of April 2006. Download (pdf) the FCC’s order here. The FCC denied a similar request from Sprint, available (pdf) here.