BALTIMORE -- State regulators are confronting an increasingly tortured relationship with the FCC, creating a task force to address it Monday at the NARUC meeting. It consists of seven commissioners and is already official and active. Meanwhile, two NARUC resolutions directly address the fractured FCC relationship, as was expected (CD Nov 2 p12), and NARUC adopted both resolutions as policy Tuesday after they advanced through the telecom subcommittee and committee. One urges FCC referral to the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service as well as to the Federal-State Joint Board on Jurisdictional Separations on major decisions, and another addresses a pending Supreme Court case on the Chevron doctrine, looking at the risk of federal overreach of authority.

Carriers’ capital expenditures may be a boon for small firms and those owned by women, minorities and other disadvantaged groups, the heads of PCIA and USTelecom said Thursday. Building more towers and adding other equipment to meet subscribers’ demand for data applications gives such firms an opportunity, speakers at a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council event said. CEOs Walter McCormick of USTelecom and Jonathan Adelstein of PCIA cited AT&T’s plan disclosed Wednesday to spend $14 billion on wireless and wireline broadband capacity (CD Nov 8 p11).

Nov. 5 Practising Law Institute “talk like a geek” webcast, 9 a.m. -- http://xrl.us/bnudjr

Oct. 29 FCBA Intellectual Property Committee brown bag lunch on Internet Radio Fairness Act, 12:15 p.m., Wilkinson Barker, 2300 N St. NW, Suite 7 -- http://xrl.us/bimfn6

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” was the reaction of Solvable Frustrations (SFI) to the overwhelming opposition to its request that the FCC modify its rules to create a class action complaint procedure (CD Oct 11 p5). Despite the “strident opposition” of USTelecom, AT&T, Verizon and others, the proposed rule “addresses a concrete problem,” SFI said (http://xrl.us/bnv2ta). Opponents’ concerns about the impact on commission resources are “invalid,” and the agency has the authority to adopt class complaint procedures, SFI said. “To best serve the ends of justice, certain telecommunications-specific class actions may prove best suited to an expert resolution through class complaint procedures utilized by the Commission,” SFI said. The company, which runs a website addressing consumer complaints, asked the FCC to “expeditiously” grant the petition and start a rulemaking proceeding.

The imminent FCC special access data request (CD Oct 23 p3) is neither imminent nor a request. The order that’s been circulating on the eighth floor doesn’t explicitly ask telecom providers for data on the state of competition in the special access marketplace, FCC officials told us Thursday. Rather, they said it gives delegated authority to the Wireline Bureau staff, providing guidance on what the data collection should say. It’s up to the bureau to actually pose the data questions, commission officials said. A bureau spokesman declined comment.

Due to the economic constraints of deploying broadband in rural and high-cost areas, carriers that accept Connect America Fund Phase II support would generally build or maintain fiber-to-the-DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplier) rather than deploy a “new and more capital intensive technology like FTTP” (fiber to the premises), USTelecom told the FCC Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bnvtiw). The commission should model fiber-to-the-DSLAM costs to ensure close alignment with carriers’ actual forward looking costs, USTelecom said. The ABC Coalition objects to the use of an FTTP model, USTelecom said.

An FCC proposal to reform its regulatory fee process highlighted a rift between the satellite industry and telecom providers, which disagree on how to count work done by full-time employees (FTE) in different bureaus. The FCC proposed in July (http://xrl.us/bnvuqh) to reform its processes for assessing the fees that cover its operational costs, changing how it allocates “direct” and “indirect” FTEs to calculate fees. Based on aggregated bureau-level FTE data, the commission would allocate all FTEs in the Wireless, Media, Wireline and International bureaus as “direct” and all FTEs in the support bureaus as “indirect.” In replies, the satellite industry criticized telco and carrier proposals to treat all work done by FTEs as the same, fearing this could lead to disproportionately high fees for earth and space station applications.

"Rachel from card member services” keeps calling, and industry officials are trying to figure out how to silence her nefarious rings. Officials gathered Thursday at the FTC’s “Robocall Summit” to deal with the issue, as “Rachel” became a kind of shorthand for the transnational networks of robocallers intent on manipulating the VoIP system. Until the industry implements new solutions as it transitions to an all-Internet Protocol network, filing a complaint with donotcall.gov is the “only viable option” for consumers who get unwanted robocalls, said FCC Chief Technology Officer Henning Schulzrinne. The FTC also announced a $50,000 prize for anyone who can provide a technical solution to block robocalls.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai pushed for creation of an Internet Protocol transition task force to help modernize the commission’s “anachronistic laws” and accelerate the technological changes in the communications industry. “We need to adopt a holistic approach to confronting this challenge instead of addressing issues on a piecemeal basis as they happen to pop up,” Pai said Tuesday at an event on Internet transformation hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Communications Liberty and Innovation Project (CLIP). “The work of the task force will be as daunting as it is necessary, for we simply cannot not import the broken, burdensome economic regulations of the PSTN [public switched telephone network] into an all-IP world."