Cellular Phone Billing Notification Sought

WASHINGTON —  Laying the groundwork for the day when the current system is changed and callers pay for mobile phone calls, the cellular industry wants federal regulators to adopt national rules that would require callers to know they will be billed.

The idea of having the caller pay when dialing a mobile phone has not caught on in the United States, although it is standard in Europe and Asia.

In this country, the person receiving a mobile-phone call--not the caller--foots the bill. As a result, many Americans switch off their phones to avoid unwanted calls.

But the cellular phone industry is pushing to change that.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Assn. planned to ask the Federal Communications Commission today to adopt a uniform notification standard, according to a draft of the petition obtained by Associated Press.

That standard, however, would not require callers to be given information about the cost of the call because it would be expensive to implement, the draft petition said. It would only inform callers that they would be billed for the mobile phone call.

The industry’s request is aimed at avoiding the possibility of having a confusing state-by-state patchwork of differing requirements, the petition said. The industry was also expected to ask the FCC to work to remove regulatory impediments to companies offering the calling-party-pays approach.

A few companies do provide some form of the caller-pays approach. Some split the cost of incoming long-distance calls by making the caller pay the long-distance charge and the receiver pay a local-access fee.

In January, AT&T; Corp., the nation’s largest wireless company, announced it would test the caller-pays option this summer and extend it to its 8.2 million wireless customers by the end of the year.

But there are hurdles to offering such service. One of the biggest is for mobile phone companies to be able to keep track of each caller and bill him or her.

To this end, the industry was expected to ask the FCC to require that local telephone companies, which already have information on their customers for billing purposes, share that information with mobile phone companies. The information would be shared only when the local phone customer calls a mobile phone company that uses the caller-pays option.