D.C. Circuit Court Upholds FCC Orders Requiring Intermodal and Wireless-to-Wireless Number Portability, but Stays Effectiveness of Intermodal Order on Procedural Grounds
On March 11, 2005, the D.C. Circuit Court issued two separate decisions disposing of challenges to the FCC’s number portability orders addressing wireless-to-wireless porting and wireline-to-wireless porting. In the first case, Central Texas Telephone Cooperative v. FCC, the court rejected a challenge by certain rural telephone companies against an FCC order that (i) required wireless carriers to port numbers to other wireless carriers if their service areas overlap and (ii) declined to limit wireless-to-wireless porting only to wireless carriers with facilities or numbering resources in the same rate center. The court found that the FCC order qualified as an interpretative rule, rather than a legislative rule, under the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") because the order interpreted regulations adopted in a
