LAS VEGAS -- AT&T is very optimistic about the direction the FCC is heading on the IP transition, with a rulemaking teed up for a vote at the commission’s January meeting, said Senior Vice President Bob Quinn. Speakers during a CES panel hosted by USTelecom said the transition to IP from a plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) world is one of the biggest issues facing the agency. “I'm pretty optimistic,” Quinn said. “One of the things they [at the FCC] really get is that this be voluntary. I don’t think they want to mandate people to participate in this trial. … They want telephone companies who are interested in conducting these test beds to come forward and say, ‘Where would [you] like to have these done and what is your timeframe, what is your plan.'"

Submitting refined study area boundary maps, necessary for implementation of the FCC’s Connect America Fund benchmarking rule, “would require a very substantial, industry-wide effort with (at best) speculative results,” and in any case cannot be completed by Jan. 13, Verizon told the FCC in a filing Monday (http://bit.ly/19AIKUt). Verizon was writing to support a Dec. 17 petition by several ILEC associations -- including USTelecom, of which Verizon is a member -- to stay the requirement, or grant an extension of time to reconcile study area boundaries (CD Dec 19 p12). The Wireline Bureau’s proposal that ILECs review an online map of aggregate study area boundary data and resolve and recertify overlaps and voids is “an extensive process” that can’t realistically be performed by the requested deadline, Verizon said. It’s not even clear that the data will be needed at all, the ILEC said, given that it’s intended for use as an input to the quantile regression analysis, which may itself be eliminated (CD Dec 18 p2). Even if the commission continues to use the quantile regression analysis, the Jan. 13 deadline doesn’t give ILECs and state commissions enough time to reconcile and revise their study area boundary data, Verizon said.

It’s time for new telecom policies to match the “new marketplace,” USTelecom President Walter McCormick said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1ijg7DA). One hundred years after the Kingsbury Commitment that made AT&T a government-sanctioned monopoly in exchange for “agreeing to pervasive economic regulation,” it’s time for “early 20th century policies” to sunset, McCormick said. “Today the notion of a single voice provider is quaint, at best,” he said. “After 100 years, it’s time to leave the wireline-centric regulation of the monopoly voice era behind, focus on the broader social compact between network operators and their customers, and embrace our nation’s highly competitive, consumer driven, Internet-enabled future."

NCTA faces opposition to its request for the FCC to review the Wireline Bureau’s data collection order on the state of the special access marketplace. In comments filed Tuesday, USTelecom, the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance and Sprint argued against full commission review. NCTA had asked the commission to modify the data request “to reduce the burden on cable operators and other competitive providers” in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (http://bit.ly/18RlukP). NCTA also argued the bureau ignored “critical concerns” about the security of the data it would collect. The bureau submitted the data collection request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for PRA approval earlier this month.

President Barack Obama suggested the U.S. might be able to accomplish its intelligence goals by other means than the Patriot Act Section 215 phone metadata surveillance, he told reporters at a news conference Friday before leaving for Hawaii. He had received 46 recommendations from a five-member review group he appointed on Wednesday (CD Dec 19 p4) -- recommendations that criticized the efficacy of the National Security Agency program, urged industry or a third party to hold the metadata and to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow for a public advocate, among other changes. AT&T, meanwhile, followed Verizon’s lead (CD Dec 20 p1) and said it will also post transparency reports.

It’s important to implement Phase II of the Connect America Fund “promptly and thoughtfully,” Frontier, Windstream and USTelecom told an aide to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel Monday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1jmUunl). The groups, representing the ABC Coalition, told the aide that many challengers of Round 2 of CAF Phase I incremental support “have not borne their burden” of demonstrating the challenged census blocks are “in fact served” by fixed Internet service of at least 3 Mbps down/768 kbps up.

The scope of the FTC’s proposed study of patent assertion entities is “far broader than necessary to serve the proper performance of the functions of the FTC,” said InterDigital in a filing to the FTC released Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/1ho7tkd). The FTC voted in September to begin exploring a proposed PAE study, which it would launch using its authority under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act (CD Sept 30 p15). InterDigital said it doesn’t believe it’s a PAE as the FTC defined it in its study proposal, though many of the company’s critics have defined it as one. The FTC defined PAEs as “firms with a business model based primarily on purchasing patents and then attempting to generate revenue” by asserting their intellectual property rights “against persons who are already practicing the patented technologies.” Intellectual property groups and other companies often defined as PAEs also expressed significant concerns with the proposed study.

Several telecom associations asked the FCC for a stay of rules requiring their members to “reconcile and revise study area boundary data” that will ultimately be published in an online map of study area boundaries (http://bit.ly/JIaL6y). NTCA, USTelecom, the Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance, Western Telecommunications Alliance and Eastern Rural Telecom Association asked Wednesday for a stay or a six-month extension to let the companies gather the information. The Wireline Bureau’s study area boundary order said the data would be used to implement the USF/intercarrier compensation benchmarking rule, which uses quantile regression analysis to generate capital and operating expense limits for each rate-of-return carrier study area. “The Chairman has indicated that consideration will be given by the Commission to the elimination of the quantile regression analysis ... mechanism in the near future,” the petition said. “Absence of the QRA would remove the stated reason for the study area boundary process, and particularly for the burdensome and time-consuming efforts that will be involved in reconciling many hundreds of overlaps and voids.” If the boundary data are still required, the groups said, a six-month extension is necessary to ensure accuracy. The groups are awaiting details of the QRA replacement FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told Congress the agency is working on (CD Dec 18 p2).

FCC hires Sara Morris, ex-NTIA, as Office of Legislative Affairs acting director, effective Jan. 2; acting Director Patrick Halley will become Wireline Bureau associate chief … USTelecom promotes to vice presidents Kevin Rupy for law & policy and Sarah Versaggi for congressional affairs, and hires Mary Schultz, ex-Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, as director-marketing and events … Information Technology & Innovation Foundation hires Doug Brake, ex-Silicon Flatirons, as telecom policy analyst … magicJack VocalTec VoIP company hires Timothy McDonald, ex-Scatteree Partners, as chief operating officer … Disney promotes Katharine Linke to vice president of multiplatform programming, Disney Channels U.S.

The impending end of the USF quantile regression analysis, disclosed by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler while being questioned at Thursday’s House Communications Subcommittee hearing, came as a shock to industry members who had long been urging QRA’s elimination. Wheeler told Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., he had asked the bureau to draft an order “to eliminate the QRA and return to the high-cost loop support model” (CD Dec 13 p4). There’s no word from the Wireline Bureau about what the replacement will look like, but many industry officials we interviewed were hoping for a predictable model based on plant depreciation.