ATnT accuses FCC for Sprint, T-Mobile Wi-Fi calling favoristism

AT&T in a letter accused Federal Communications Commission or FCC for delaying the progress on the company’s waiver for Wi-Fi calling. In a letter sent to the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, the cellular giant mentioned snail-progress on the waiver that is not by the FCC’s rules about accessibility for speech and hearing impaired people.

AT&T is accusing FCC to be biased for its waiver, where other companies, including Sprint, T-Mobile, are already providing the Wi-Fi calling feature by openly violating the laws right under the nose of FCC. AT&T is asking what the watchdogs are doing, and why the Commission isn’t looking forward to taking an action against them.

The cellular company applied for this waiver in the month of July to align with the release of iOS 9 in the month of September. The applications are still getting processed, and AT&T is yet to offer the Wi-Fi calling for its customers in the United States. It was very much anticipated that the AT&T would be the first company to introduce this Wi-Fi calling on the iOS 9, however, FCC seems to vanish all of that beneath the papers of waiver filings.

“There is growing concern at AT&T that there is an asymmetry in the application of federal regulations to AT&T on the one hand and its marketplace competitors on the other hand,” Jim Cicconi, head of legislative affairs for AT&T, wrote in the letter. “This situation simply adds fuel to the fire.”

AT&T says that the Sprint and T-Mobile are already providing the service that manages to switch to the Wi-Fi network whenever a weak cellular network is encountered by the smartphone, which as per the FCC rules is illegal. Also, these companies aren’t seeking permissions for it anytime soon.

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.

Spring and T-Mobile offerings clearly violate the FCC rules mentioning that feature, and still the commission is taking no action against them.

Other than that, the AT&T is also under FCC’s hawk eye for limiting the speeds of users with unlimited bandwidth soon they cross the fair usage of 7GB. To this AT&T mentions that one percent of users are using the Internet more than 7GB, and it raises suspicion for them using the mobile connection for running a server or whatsoever.