USTelecom signed on to the NCTA/EducationSuperHighway K-12 Bridge to Broadband program of working with school districts to buy internet service for low-income families with students through sponsored service agreements. It said Thursday members joining include AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, Windstream, Consolidated and Shentel. Meanwhile, Comcast announced Lift Zones, a multiyear plan for more than 1,000 Wi-Fi connections in community centers for students, plus educational and digital skills content. Its Internet Essentials program has helped more than 8 million low-income people get residential internet, Comcast said.

USTelecom and Incompas have an unbundled dark fiber transport compromise, following their LEC line access pact proposed to the FCC (see 2008060044), they said in docket 19-308 Tuesday. They urged the FCC to adopt the two concurrently and "bring finality and certainty to issues that have long bedeviled parties and policymakers alike." Since requesting carriers are impaired without unbundled access to dark fiber transport to any Tier 34 wire center more than half a mile from alternative fiber, the compromise would have the FCC find non-impairment and use its authority to forbear from the obligation to provide unbundled dark fiber transport to wire centers within a half mile of alternative fiber where unbundled transport currently isn't required. They said competitive LECs will still have unbundled access to all dark fiber transport arrangements ordered before the order's effective date for eight years, during which the incumbent LEC won't increase rates for access to unbundled dark fiber.

The FCC made the right decision on Ligado, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told Incompas Tuesday during its virtual conference. Pai stressed FCC focus on 5G, saying the upcoming C-band auction will be “massive.” Pai said more is coming, including on the 5.9 GHz band and a follow-up order on 6 GHz (see 2008200040). “We have a lot of big irons in the fire,” he said.

USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter and Incompas CEO Chip Pickering spoke with FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks about their agreement on whether LECs need to provide access to DS0, DS1, DS3 and operation support systems, and how much, said a filing posted Thursday in docket 19-308. The two previously spoke with other four commissioners (see 2008280063).

The FCC got suggestions of changes to its broadband mapping and data collection rulemaking approved in July (see 2007160062), in docket 19-195 comments posted Wednesday. USTelecom and the Wireless ISP Association said the FCC shouldn't require providers to supply testing or other latency verification and it should exclude non-mass market business-only services. They said that verification can't happen until the fabric is created and that geocoordinates should become the standard format when evaluating outside data. They said the FCC should end broadband deployment data collection that's part of its Form 477. Connected Nation said the FCC should either collect speed information below 25/3 Mbps in three speed tiers or the baseline should be reporting at 3 Mbps/768 kbps with two speed tiers, and should collect round-trip latency information, defining the points on the network between which latency is measured. The Competitive Carriers Association said a standard way of reporting signal strength has benefits, but mobile operators look at a wide variety of variables that influence a link budget. CCA said the agency should provide guidance on in-vehicle penetration on a per-frequency basis and make sure verification procedures aren't a sizable burden. AT&T said providers shouldn't have to submit “business-only” broadband service availability data, but all carriers should have to identify the latency capability of fixed broadband service. It backed requiring service technologies to certify to the same latency threshold but said there's a need to differentiate among technologies with higher latency standards. The Broadband Data Act doesn't require changing the broadband data the commission collects from satellite providers because what the agency gets now is accurate, nor is latency information needed, Hughes said. If the FCC decides it wants additional latency information, all providers should report whether their service offerings fall above or below a certain threshold, Hughes said. Incompas said when the FCC refers to its facilities-based definition for broadband providers that must file polygons, it should use a different definition of facilities-based provider, or it will end up with results overstating availability. Next Century Cities urged collecting additional location-specific speed and pricing data. WTA said the approach to defining locations should differ for broadband mapping and Connect America Fund buildout purposes. CTIA's petition for reconsideration said the FCC should look again at its disparate treatment of link budget information of mobile and fixed wireless providers, and at its requiring modeling of in-vehicle usage coverage in addition to outdoor stationary coverage for each mobile wireless technology.

Chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC remains focused on illegal robocalls, consumers’ top interest at the agency. Carriers don’t want “this junk traffic," he told USTelecom Wednesday. Pai said cooperative efforts are working.

Cable ISP interests like NCTA's pole attachment declaratory ruling petition (see 2007170023), while telecom, localities and utilities interests are more mixed, judging by docket 17-84 comments last week. The petition "confirms what the Commission already knows ...: utilities often charge unjust and unreasonable pole replacement fees" that impede network deployment, ACA Connects said. It urged codifying policies including that a utility can't assess pole replacement fees if there isn't "insufficient capacity" on an existing pole. Charter Communications said despite being told make-ready charges must reflect just the costs caused by an attachment, pole owners "frequently leverage their superior bargaining position" to make an attacher seeking access buy a new pole and pay for installation. Altice said it has run into high make-ready fees for replacements, and the FCC needs to clarify that pole owners must share in the cost of replacements in unserved areas. It applauded expedited processing of pole attachment complaints for unserved areas. Calling the petition "anti competitive, misleading and ill-informed," the Coalition of Concerned Utilities said electric utility pole owners often voluntarily replace poles and add capacity. NCTA's petition would require they pay for these capacity expansions and obligate them to expand rapidly, even at the expense of safety and reliability, the coalition said. The Edison Electric Institute, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and Utilities Technology Council said the FCC has acknowledged that leaving pole owners with unrecoverable costs would create a disincentive for utilities to build taller poles or replace poles. Next Century Cities said the digital divide won't be closed more quickly by cutting local government authority to determine the cost of replacing poles, with the FCC sole arbiter. Putting attachment complaints on an accelerated docket is a problem for municipalities now, as they lack time and resources to adequately respond that quickly, it said. AT&T said NCTA's push that it's unjust in unserved areas for a pole owner to make a new attacher pay for all the replacement costs is an attempt to change rules. Rules also let access disputes be eligible for an accelerated docket, it said. USTelecom said the issues raised in the petition are better off as part of a rulemaking, adding that cable has been successfully building out networks to new locations. The Wireless Infrastructure Association backed the petition, saying pole owners should share in replacement costs everywhere, not just unserved areas.

The draft order on circulation revising who pays to move toll-free traffic and who gets paid (see here) hews fairly closely in many areas to the USTelecom consensus proposal (see 2006080002), FCC and industry officials and representatives said in interviews last week. Agency and company representatives said it's unlikely to be voted out soon because it's not a high-priority item. The regulator didn't comment Friday.

USTelecom, the Session Initiation Protocol Forum and carriers warned FCC staff of potential pitfalls in implementing secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) and secure handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken) as a tool to block unwanted robocalls. “Widespread deployment by originating and terminating VoIP providers will reduce the effectiveness of illegal spoofing and assist efforts to quickly identify calls with illegally spoofed caller ID information,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 17-97: “Deployment obligations beyond voice service providers’ authentication at origination and verification at termination, however, can undermine the framework.” They said every Form 499 filer should “be required to certify that it has implemented an appropriate robocall mitigation program and the Commission should maintain a database identifying the providers that issued those certifications.” Representatives of the two groups, AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier and Verizon spoke with staff from the Wireline and Public Safety bureaus.

USTelecom countered an Incompas grandfathering proposal on dark fiber (see 2002060006). Incompas proposed that even if the FCC decides CLECs aren’t impaired without access to dark fiber, “it should nevertheless require incumbent local exchange to indefinitely continue to offer unbundled access to any dark fiber arrangements ordered before January 6, 2020,” USTelecom said in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 19-308: “This outcome would be contrary to the Communications Act, Commission and judicial precedent, and Congressional intent.” USTelecom spoke with Office of General Counsel and Wireline Bureau staff. “USTelecom’s claim of a concession is completely and utterly false,” emailed Incompas CEO Chip Pickering: The Telecom Act “serves as the government’s contract with the people to guarantee they have access to broadband competition. Dark fiber is the bridge to broadband for both urban and rural communities. Cutting it off will leave millions of Americans in the dark.”