March 22, 2006 Marlene H. Dortch Federal Communications Commission Office of the Secretary 445 12Th Street, SW Washington, DC 2
1875 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006 Tel: 202 303 1000 Fax: 202 303 2000 March 22, 2006 Marlene H. Dortch Federal Communications Commission Office of the Secretary 445 12th Street, SW Washington, DC 20554 Re: In re Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals with Hearing and Speech Disabilities; Petition for Declaratory Ruling on Video Relay Service Interoperability, CG Docket No. 03-123 Dear Ms. Dortch: On March 20, 2006, representatives of Snap Telecommunications, Inc. (“Snap”), Aequus Technologies Corp. (“Aequus”), and WorldGate Communications, Inc. (“WorldGate”) met with Tom Chandler, Chief, Disability Rights Office; Jay Keithley, Deputy Bureau Chief, Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau; Greg Hlibok, Disability Rights Office; and Sharon Diskin, Office of the General Counsel. Also attending the meeting were David Dinin, President, Aequus; Daryl Crouse, President and Founder, Snap; Randy Gort, General Counsel, WorldGate; Richard Westerfer, Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice-President, WorldGate; and the undersigned. During the meeting, the parties supported the petition in the above-captioned proceeding and opposed restrictive marketing practices, IP blocking, or other techniques by a VRS provider designed to prevent a hearing-impaired individual from placing a VRS call to a different VRS provider. However, the parties also cautioned the Commission to avoid the adoption of requirements in this proceeding that could have the inadvertent effect of impeding the ability of new or existing VRS providers from introducing VRS equipment and services implementing the newer and more robust open standard called Session Initiation Protocol (“SIP”). The parties described the benefits of SIP in providing functionally equivalent service for the hearing-impaired community, the fact that SIP is increasingly being embraced as the standard of choice in the video phone and VoIP arenas, and that SIP is the focus of significant efforts by various industry players to establish E-911 solutions for VoIP and VRS.
[Show full text]