AT&T warned of looming challenges to rules for the sale of the C band, in a meeting with FCC General Counsel Tom Johnson. “Some parties have asserted that the [C-Band Alliance’s] private sale of ‘clearing rights’ with winning bidders subsequently applying for licenses would violate the requirement that new spectrum licenses be awarded through a system of competitive bidding,” AT&T said in docket 18-122, posted Monday. “AT&T is also concerned that, without notice and comment to adopt detailed Commission rules governing the auction and the transition, various stakeholders may bring notice or arbitrariness claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and otherwise reduce their support for, and participation in, the reallocation process,” the carrier said: Risk remains of “judicial appeals, and because of the nature of the objections, those appeals could leave the proposed auction in an extended legal limbo that could delay reallocation of this spectrum for years.” America’s Communications Association, meanwhile, filed a new report from Vantage Point Solutions in docket 18-122 on the amount of fiber required under its C-band plan. The report said connecting all MVPD earth stations with fiber through the purchase of indefeasible rights of use (IRUs) on 300,000 route miles of existing fiber and the construction of 120,000 additional route miles, “as proposed in the 5G Plus Plan, is achievable within the plan’s 18-36 month timeframe for urban and suburban markets and five-year timeframe for rural areas,” said the filing. IRUs for 300,000 route miles of fiber “are relatively easy to acquire in today’s market, and fiber IRU availability is nearly ubiquitous in urban and suburban areas,” ACA said: MVPDs are “capable of deploying hundreds of thousands of fiber route miles annually, far more than the plan requires.”

The FCC Enforcement Bureau settled with CenturyLink and West Safety Communications to end a probe into a multistate 911 outage on Aug. 1, 2018. Under consent decrees, CenturyLink agreed to pay $400,000 and West $175,000, and pledged to implement a compliance plan, the FCC said Monday. The 65-minute outage occurred when a West Safety Services technician mistakenly made a configuration change to the 911 routing network, resulting in many calls failing to route properly to 911 centers, the FCC said. In June, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission voted 5-0 to require more 911 reporting by CenturyLink after a state probe into the 911 outage (see 1906130053). “The August 2018 event was caused by a third-party vendor’s employee error,” a CenturyLink spokesperson emailed. “We quickly notified public safety officials in impacted areas,” then “focused our efforts on future reliability by working closely with our vendor to ensure improved processes were implemented to prevent this type of error from recurring.” FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said the FCC should have hit CenturyLink harder, especially as a repeat offender (see 1504060050). The settlement “does not address the repeat nature of the outages, and in fact the consent decree fails to even mention the 2015 action,” he said: “Today’s consent decree re-adopts measures previously instituted, including designating a compliance officer and developing and implementing a compliance plan reflecting industry best practices. Notably, even though the consent decree assigns fault for the outage at issue here to a subcontractor, the compliance plan contains nothing about better coordination and supervision of such parties.”

Incompas General Counsel Angie Kronenberg asked members Monday to share their perspectives on proposals for the FCC on how it should address the USF contribution factor to make the program more sustainable. She spoke at the end of a policy talk at the annual Incompas show in Louisville. She said Incompas, NTCA, the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition and other USF stakeholders have begun discussions toward an agreement on suggestions to overhaul the USF contribution system that they will take to the FCC. Last month, state members of a federal-state joint task force on universal service sent their own proposal to the FCC, which included an assessment of residential broadband (see 1910150045). During the policy panel, Inteserra Consulting Vice President Carey Roesel predicted the USF contribution factor, already at a record high this quarter of 25 percent, could reach 40 percent within three years if the FCC and the Universal Service Administrative Co. don't make changes.

The few filings the FCC received on a September NPRM (see 1909060030) proposing that the agency fully transition its universal licensing system, its largest, from paper to electronic, were positive. Commenters said the FCC should do the same for other systems including for antenna structure registration. “The Commission’s recent efforts to modernize its filing and information retention systems have greatly improved public access to data, decreased costs for applicants and consumers, and improved efficiency for both the Commission and the companies it regulates,” Verizon said, saying more can be done. Applicants today can't file “two-step transactions, subleases, pre-close leases, and certain requests for special temporary authorization” in the ULS, the carrier said. “Lessees also cannot currently assign or transfer control leases in ULS,” Verizon said: “Instead, these applications must be filed on paper in Annapolis Junction [Maryland]. The office there then must forward the application to the appropriate FCC staff for processing. And the applicant must wait for a return package to ensure the application was filed.” AT&T urged the commission to “use this proceeding as an opportunity to consider other ways in which it can make its ULS and ASR systems more streamlined, transparent, and user-friendly. … AT&T believes the Commission’s rules for service of documents should be clear and consistent, and the Commission should proceed cautiously in changing these rules.” The Enterprise Wireless Alliance said electronic filing “should be the standard for all wireless application filings, authorizations, and correspondence.” Dealing with paper filings is time consuming, EWA said: “In EWA’s opinion, it is time for exempted classes of users to begin filing their applications electronically. The six-month period proposed in the NPRM should be ample to allow those parties to switch to a filing process that is used by many thousands of their peers.” The Blooston law firm group of rural wireless carriers noted that last year 5,000 of 425,000 ULS filings were manual and 15 of 7,000 ASR filings. “The Commission’s proposal is not unreasonable, provided that it is willing to liberally waive the electronic filing requirement in the event of electronic submission issues that occur from time to time,” Blooston said: “This is especially necessary for licensees in the Part 90 Private Radio Services, which were exempted from electronic filing when ULS was originally adopted.” Filings were posted last week in docket 19-212.

The FCC Wireline Bureau granted waiver to Lifeline subscribers sent letters from Universal Service Administrative Co. inaccurately telling them they had 90 days rather than 60 to recertify eligibility, in an order in Thursday's Daily Digest on docket 17-287. Lifeline subscribers must recertify eligibility every 12 months, and when USAC can't verify continued eligibility through its database, it sends a notification letter. Lifeline typically drops subscribers who don't recertify within 60 days, but USAC letters July 16-Sept. 18 gave 90 days. USAC corrected a system error Sept. 19 and is providing the correct 60-day deadline. By Oct. 7, about 16,000 Lifeline subscribers who had received the incorrect deadline had already recertified, but about 24,000 hadn't, or they recertified after the standard 60-day deadline.

The FCC Wireline Bureau is "more narrowly" tailoring penalties for its broadband performance testing program to recognize past performance in carriers that fall out of compliance at the end of their USF Connect America Fund support terms, said an order to docket 10-90 posted Thursday. It will withhold support when a carrier is unable to demonstrate compliance at the end of the support term "only for the amount of time since the carrier's network performance was last compliant." It clarified that if a carrier "was not in compliance with our performance measures for five quarters of testing but comes into compliance before or during end-of-term testing," Universal Service Administrative Co. wouldn't recover any of the CAF support. But if the carrier never comes into compliance during the test period, USAC will withhold the appropriate amount for the entire term. The order differs from its draft by reconsidering a requirement for carriers to meet CAF performance test obligations even when customers chosen at random for testing haven't bought service offerings at the CAF-required speeds. Industry sought the changes (see 1910220007) and commissioners approved the order at their meeting Friday.

Instituting new Lifeline broadband minimum service standards Dec. 1 and reducing support for voice "will not only undermine the commission's primary purpose in establishing the minimum service standards -- to increase broadband access -- but will threaten the program's very existence," TracFone told the FCC, posted Wednesday in docket 11-42. The changes restricting low-income consumers' access to Lifeline and undermining the program's affordability would be so severe it would "set into motion a death spiral" for the program, it said. The company proposed partial grant of an earlier joint petition to delay the new standards (see 1906280012). The FCC should enforce a monthly broadband data allowance of 3 GB on Dec. 1 instead of 8.75 GB, TracFone said, expedite by one year its Lifeline market report to June, and freeze the new Dec. 1 standards until the report's evaluated. The Wireline Bureau should study how increases in data allowances beyond the current 2 GB requirement affect the market, it said. TracFone also wants the FCC to consider keeping the current subsidy for voice. In a Thursday filing, the National Lifeline Association and Q Link Wireless said "phasing out support for voice services endangers public safety," and "there is no support for the voice phase-out in the record."

More should be done to promote broadband competition, reported Jonathan Sallet, Benton Institute for Broadband & Society senior fellow, on broadband for the 2020s. He said Wednesday states should repeal laws that restrict localities from broadband deployment or Congress should pre-empt them. Federal funding designed to avoid overbuilding ISP networks confuse well-being of competitors with consumers, he said: Those most likely having limited broadband competition are rural, or with median household incomes below $60,000. Sallet cited the National Digital Inclusion Alliance showing pockets of high-poverty neighborhoods in Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, Dallas and Dayton where incumbent telecoms hadn't deployed fiber. Proposed Lifeline changes to eliminate mobile resellers would effectively end Lifeline broadband access for millions, the report said. Sallet instead recommends schools and libraries be allowed to provide Lifeline, too. Such competition could increase once the national verifier is fully implemented, Sallet suggested. "An even more efficient mechanism would make Lifeline enrollment automatic when people are enrolled in a qualifying federal program." The 150-page footnoted document acknowledged a persistent problem of areas unserved by broadband, saying the executive branch should establish an Office of Broadband Coordination for Tribal Lands.

A new draft FCC order on updating E-rate would finalize a five-year-spending approach for category 2 equipment and services inside anchor institutions, agency officials told us. The Wireline Bureau draft circulated Oct. 18. Without a yes vote, the spending pilot sunsets in 2020, a spokesperson said Wednesday. The FCC took comment this summer in docket 13-184, and filings widely supported moving to a districtwide funding approach to give localities more flexibility to direct resources where most needed; commenters also sought a larger funding floor for rural institutions to incentivize more of them to apply (see 1908190008). A vote is expected before schools and libraries submit proposals for the next funding year. The Enforcement Bureau also drafted an order on circulation about an unresolved market dispute between Verizon and Wide Band filed in June. The FCC doesn't comment on pending enforcement matters.

The Senate expects to hold a cloture vote Wednesday on an amendment from Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., that seeks to replace the text of the House-passed “minibus” FY 2020 budget bill (HR-3055) that includes funding for NTIA, other Commerce Department agencies and the Agriculture Department with similar Senate Appropriations Committee-cleared measures S-2522 and S-2584 (see 1909240053 and 1910080043). Both bills would allocate $42.4 million to NTIA and $3.45 billion to the Patent and Trademark Office. The Senate bill would allocate $753 million to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, $2 million more than in HR-3055 and $353 million above what President Donald Trump's administration said it wanted (see 1903180063). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., filed cloture on the amendment Monday. McConnell also filed cloture on the House-passed FY 2020 minibus budget bill (HR-2740) that aimed to increase CPB's annual funding to $495 million. Senate leaders have been eyeing replacing the House-passed legislative language with a Senate Appropriations substitute that would maintain CPB's annual funding at $445 million, despite the increase sought by America’s Public Television Stations (see 1909180058). The Senate version also includes $20 million for upgrades to the public broadcasting interconnection system. The Trump administration proposed in March to wind down and then cut off CPB federal funding.