It seems like every few weeks I have a conversation with a carrier and in the course of conversation I find out that they are not in compliance with some regulation or another. It seems like a lot of companies that sell VoIP services, in particular, think that somehow that makes them immune from regulation.
But regulation has not gone away. If you bill an end-user customer for a voice, data or video product then there are regulations that you have to comply with. If you are an ISP for other entities, even if those entities are large, you are subject to some regulation. The only category of carrier that might not be subject to regulation is what I call a carrier’s carrier, and who only serves other carriers as customers. And in some states even they are subject to regulation.
It matters that you follow the rules. It seems like regulators at both the state and the federal level are getting surly about offenders and there some big fines being handed down to carriers who ignore regulation. I think the cost of compliance is cheaper than the cost of getting caught.
Here is a sample of the kinds of federal regulations that we see carriers ignoring. There are other state requirements that are also being ignored:
- CALEA. There are significant obligations to be read to immediately give access of your customer’s voice and data records to law enforcement. You must have a manual filed that describes the processes.
- CPNI / Privacy. You must have a manual and processes describing how you will protect your customers’ privacy.
- Red Flag. You must have a manual and processes in place to demonstrate how you will protect your customers from identity theft.
- Net Neutrality. There is very specific information about your company, your products, your network and your technology that you must inform customers about.
- 21st Century Communications Video Accessibility Act. You must file a plan on how you will help disabled customers get access to voice, video and data products.
- Universal Service Contributions. We find carriers that should be contributing to the USF fund who are not. The fines for getting caught for this can be huge.
I told my readers that I wasn’t going to write too many blog entries that are direct sales pitches for CCG services. I will admit that many of my blogs hint at the services we offer, but the main intentions of these blogs is to discuss issues for carriers that I think they will find to be useful. But in many cases CCG is able to help clients with a lot of the topics discussed in my blog.
CCG has three regulatory products that make it easy for anybody to stay in compliance with the rules. We have many clients who use CCG as their regulatory arm and many have said that it’s far cheaper to use us than to do it themselves. Here are the three products you ought to consider if you want to hand make sure that you are in compliance with the regulatory side of the business.
Regulatory Assessment. We will do a one-time assessment of your business and tell you every regulation that we think applies to you. Why guess if you are in compliance. For a modest fee we will make a list.
Regulatory Compliance Monitoring Service. In this service we develop a calendar for your company and we remind you of every regulatory deadline you must meet during the year.
Regulatory Compliance Filing Service. If you want it, we can create all of the needed paperwork and manuals, fill out the quarterly and annual forms and file everything for you. We think we have some of the best prices in the market for this kind of work.
If you want help to get into regulatory compliance or stay incompliance, give Terri Firestein of CCG a call at (301) 788-6889. We can help you take regulatory worries off your plate.