For information on the FCC’s establishment of an LNPA, please visit the FCC website at www.fcc.gov and type in the Search criteria “98-233.” Click on the document entitled “FCC 98-233” and go to the “Local Number Portability” paragraph on page 7.

A company does not necessarily have to actively use the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) in order to be charged for the service. Based on a mandate set by the FCC in 1997, all telecom companies are responsible for sharing in the cost of the LNP service.

For more specific explanations of exemptions, please see:

http://transition.fcc.gov/Forms/Form499-A/499a-2012.pdf

Once a year, every corporate customer of every telecommunications service nationwide is required to report end user revenue information on a 499A form and submit it to the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC). Neustar then uses this information to create the customer’s allocated percentage rate, the formula for which is the customer’s individual end user revenue information divided by the sum total of all end user revenues reported by all customers who have reported revenue in the same region as the individual customer.
 
All forms must be filled out in April of each year. A copy of the 499A form is available online at http://transition.fcc.gov/Forms/Form499-A/499a-2012.pdf

Contact USAC at 888-641-8722. Be sure to give them your company’s Filer ID#, as they will recognize your account by this number, and will work with you to correct your 499A information.

All LNP charges are generated based on the customer’s reported end user revenue on their most recent 499A form. All customers are charged their allocated portion for charges billed in the regions for which they have reported revenue.

Each month, Neustar bills two (2) types of charges: one for LNP, and one for SOW. Both charges are specific to the NPAC/SMS system that Neustar maintains while servicing the telecom industry. In an effort to make the bills more “user-friendly” to the customer, Neustar presents the charges separately.

It varies. Some SOWs are billed on a continual basis and have no end date, while other SOWs have an amortized time period for paying the SOW in full. Customers can review the time period it will take them to pay the SOW in full by reviewing their SOW bills and searching for the “Installment” number. Once the last installment payment has been made, the SOW is no longer billed.

If your company is no longer in business, contact USAC at 888-641-8722. Once USAC has received the appropriate documentation verifying that the company has ceased to operate, USAC will notify Neustar via a “hand-off” file that zeroes out the customer revenue in Neustar’s database. Once the revenue is zeroed out, the customer will no longer be charged.

In most situations, the cause is due to an increased number of direct charges billed from one month to the next (e.g., adding new ports, generating reports via the NPAC system, purchase of log-on ID’s). If this does not describe your situation over the past month, contact Neustar's billing hotline at 877-245-5277 for more information.

Neustar will write off all outstanding charges if (1) the customer’s termination date is prior to the charges billed by Neustar, and (2) Neustar is satisfied with the customer’s documented “out of business” status. In Chapter 11 situations, the customer will still be responsible for payment if LNP charges are assessed after the bankruptcy filing date.

Customers who receive LNP invoices totaling $1,200 per year or less are termed “pre-pay” customers, and are invoiced for an entire calendar year in the month of January. The status of all pre-pay customers is reviewed on a quarterly basis to verify that the original “estimated” amount for each is accurate. (Note: All customers in a specific region directly and indirectly affect each other’s allocated percentages by the business changes they make, including “out-of-business” declarations, mergers and acquisitions, start-ups, and the like.)  If the actual charges exceed the estimated charges, a quarterly partial invoice may be generated, typically at the end of the third or fourth quarter. In a perfect situation, once a customer is billed for pre-pay charges at the beginning of the year, it will not receive another bill until the following January.

Please note: Signed NPAC users will be billed monthly, regardless of estimated LNP charges.

All charges on a bill are for LNP services generated for the month listed on the bill . For example, if a bill’s date reads January 31, 2005, the charges are for services rendered from January 1-31, 2005.

All “M” numbers are master invoice numbers to which sub-invoice numbers have been assigned. Each individual SOW & LNP charge is assigned its own sub-invoice number, and each series of sub-invoice numbers is associated with a corresponding master invoice number.

Neustar’s billing department can be contacted directly at 1-877-BILL-277 (1-877-245-5277). Alternatively, you can send an email to billing@neustar.biz . Please remember to reference your account number or invoice number in a prominent position within the email, preferably in the subject line.