In December of 2018, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established “a database that will allow callers to determine whether a telephone number has been permanently disconnected after a date certain and therefore is no longer assigned to the party the caller intends to reach.” In June of 2020, the agency announced compliance dates in July 2020 for rules for aging numbers and maintaining records of the most recent date of permanent disconnection.
The FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau (Bureau) has now announced the compliance date for the remaining rule requiring service providers to report permanent disconnection information to the Reassigned Numbers Database Administrator. The Bureau Public Notice stated that starting on “April 15, 2021 and recurring on the 15th day of each month thereafter, service providers must report permanent disconnections of their subscribers. The report must contain data for numbers permanently disconnected that were not submitted in the service provider’s prior reports.” (https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-21-134A1.pdf). The initial data submitted will be “‘seed’ data covering the period from July 27, 2020 through April 15, 2021.”
There is an exception for “small service providers (those providers with 100,000 or fewer domestic retail subscriber lines), [which] have six additional months (until October 15, 2021) to begin reporting this information to the Reassigned Numbers Database Administrator.” These providers will initially submit data covering “the period from January 27, 2021 through October 15, 2021.”