Rules designed to speed deployment of small cells and 5G take effect Jan. 14, says a Federal Register notice scheduled for Monday. The FCC approved the changes in September over concerns by Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel (see 1809260029).

Industry groups are renewing their fight against an FCC policy statement that triples damages for amounts owed to USF and other funds. In a docket 16-330 ex parte posting Thursday, CTIA, NCTA, USTelecom and Incompas recapped a meeting with FCC Chief of Staff Matthew Berry at which they said the agency's way of defining a continuing violation in recent years runs contrary to the one-year statute of limitations for nonbroadcast notices of apparent liability contained in the Communications Act. The groups argued that four particular categories shouldn't be considering continuing violations, repeating an argument made to the Enforcement Bureau (see 1802010021). The groups petitioned in 2015, challenging the policy statement (see 1503060066).

A $600 million e-connectivity pilot program could be leveraged into $1 billion in broadband support, said Rural Utilities Service acting Administrator Chris McLean at a Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition conference Friday. He said RUS is looking at providing a mix of grants and loans, and while the former are scored dollar-for-dollar for budgetary purposes, loans aren't, allowing funding to be stretched. RUS hopes it can accept applications "early next year," he said, amid contracting and IT "contingencies." Electric co-ops are eager to participate, seeing broadband as enhancing their grids and economic opportunities in their rural communities, said Brian O'Hara, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association senior director-regulatory issues. "Interest is only growing." One complication is co-ops must get at least 85 percent of revenue from members to retain tax-exempt status, with last year's tax overhaul broadening the definition of revenue, he said. The RUS mandate is to target funding on rural areas where at least 90 percent of households lack "sufficient access" to 10/1 Mbps service, but O'Hara called for efforts to deploy 25/3 Mbps service. He said grants could be a "game changer," particularly in sparsely populated areas, because loans often "don't move the needle" making a business case. McLean quipped grants are "like dating," as "you hope it goes well," but loans are "like marriage," as RUS and recipients "have to live with each other." RUS wants project participants to have "skin in the game" and make serious commitments, and believes community partnerships are vital, he said. Program challenges include determining actual, not advertised, data speeds and figuring out how to measure service quality, he said. O'Hara credited the FCC Connect America Fund Phase II subsidy auction with expanding broadband support beyond incumbent telcos, including to electric co-ops, which he said will get about $225 million cumulatively over 10 years. He voiced interest in the Remote Areas Fund auction, but said the bigger deal will be what happens after 2021 to about $1.5 billion in annual CAF II funding currently going to large telcos. Public schools in Kent County, Maryland, provide students -- 62 percent of whom qualify for free meals -- with laptops and other devices, said Laura Jacob, the system's technology supervisor. The county government played a key role by building a 110-mile fiber network with 70 hot spots to expand home internet access, she said.

Congress should provide one-time funding to "forklift all 911 centers across the country at least to the level of technology that we've got now and that can match what FirstNet has,” APCO Chief Counsel Jeff Cohen said in an interview for C-SPAN's The Communicators, to be televised Saturday and likely put online Friday. Getting to next-generation 911 will take at least $10 billion, Cohen said. Congress is mulling NG-911 legislation (see 1809260062). The bill should be bipartisan, say that 911 must be IP-based, uniform and interoperable across country, and require states receiving grants to show they have a funding mechanism to sustain the network, Cohen said. APCO is concerned that early NG-911 deployments won't be interoperable: "If one state or one region deploys a connecting network, it will allow all the 911 centers connected to it to work together and share data [but] that's not necessarily the case if a 911 center needs to share data with another agency." State 911 fee diversion is a “terrible practice," he said. Congress can try to stop it by conditioning 911 grant programs, but the size of grants a state could lose must be significant compared with the amount a state is diverting, he said. "You need pain," which could be provided by a $10 billion NG-911 grant program, he said. Commissioner Mike O’Rielly and the FCC are doing well to “name and shame” diverters, but while the number may be shrinking somewhat, the practice stubbornly continues, he said.

An FBI investigation, which it requested the Association of National Advertisers cooperate with, was into media buying practices between advertisers and ad agencies (see 1810100051). ANA was not, as we erroneously reported, linked to a DOJ investigation into ad price collusion among major TV groups including Sinclair. That reported DOJ investigation is a separate matter from the reported FBI probe (see 1810050041).

A hold Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, placed on FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's reconfirmation remained in place Thursday night despite the commission's bid to fund payments to a top Alaska USF Rural Health Care (RHC) Program participant. The FCC Wireline Bureau said Wednesday evening it cleared Alaska telco General Communication Inc. to receive $77.8 million in RHC payments for FY 2017. Sullivan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told us that action alone won't fully resolve their concerns with FCC handling of the program, which led Sullivan to place the hold on Carr's confirmation to a full five-year term ending in 2023 (see 1809120056). Sullivan worries FCC handling of RHC negatively affected constituents (see 1809130059). The approved GCI payment figure is 26 percent less than the $105 million it sought. The agency required GCI and other RHC participants to substantiate rural telecom rates after finding two non-Alaska carriers apparently falsified documentation to inflate their rural rates, which the program subsidizes based on their differential with typically lower urban rates. The FCC proposed $40 million in fines against the two carriers. GCI didn't comment. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters he's aware of an FCC proposal “that addresses” concerns Sullivan and Murkowski raised about RHC “and we hope that this satisfies” them. The senators were still “getting feedback” on the proposal Thursday, Thune said. He said he hopes the FCC's actions might end Sullivan's hold so the Senate can confirm Carr and Democratic FCC nominee Geoffrey Starks as part of a pre-election package of nominees, though that appeared to be unlikely. Senate leaders were negotiating at our deadline on a deal that would leave the chamber in recess until after the November elections. Sullivan later told reporters he plans to meet with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai “next week” to follow up on his RHC concerns. Murkowski believes the FCC needs to address how it will provide “certainty” on processing Alaska providers' RHC applications in the future.

Hurricane Michael had a "serious impact on communication services in the Florida Panhandle and parts of Georgia," the FCC reported Thursday, based on network outage data submitted by 11 a.m. Chairman Ajit Pai cited "substantial communications outages." The FCC said one public safety answering point was reported down in Florida and 15 PSAPs in both states were "re-routed." About 19 percent of cellsites in 101 affected counties across three states were reported out of service: in Florida, seven counties had more than two-thirds of cellsites out, and four had more than one-third out; 14 Georgia counties and one Alabama county had more than one-third of cellsites out. There were 185,841 subscribers reported without cable or wireline telecom service in Florida, 63,473 in Georgia and 14,855 in Alabama. Four TV stations, 30 FMs and four AMs were reported out. Pai said his office and Public Safety Bureau staff contacted representatives of carriers and broadcasters about the situation and how to restore service as quickly as possible. "We were pleased that carriers had pre-positioned equipment and were in the process deploying cells on wheels (COWs) and cells on light trucks (COLTs) in order to get wireless service up and running in many locations," he said. USTelecom said members are coordinating with emergency responders and electric utilities to keep networks running, and summarized efforts of AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier Communications and Verizon to help affected customers. The Wireline Bureau Wednesday reminded providers of a temporary waiver it granted from a phone number "aging" rule in storm-affected areas. It lets carriers, upon customer request, disconnect phone service to avoid billing issues during network disruptions and then reinstate the customer's number when service is reconnected.

"The race is on to see who will make 6 GHz available first for Wi-Fi,” with the U.S. and the EU looking at different approaches, blogged Chris Szymanski, Broadcom director-product marketing and government affairs. The FCC will consider a 6 GHz NPRM at the Oct. 23 commissioners' meeting (see 1810020050). The proposed U.S. rules are on “the right path, but a few improvements are required,” he said Tuesday. Most important is “enabling low power indoor use throughout the 6 GHz band, which is likely to be a common sharing approach throughout various regulatory regimes and enable global equipment harmonization,” Szymanski wrote. “Harmonization leads to scale, which in turn leads to higher value at lower costs.” NAB, meanwhile, raised 6 GHz concerns in a filing in docket 18-295. The band is used for electronic news gathering, including the use of portable transmitters on cameras and temporary fixed links to transmit program material back to studios, it noted. NAB is pleased the FCC plans to restrict operations to indoor use, but said that doesn’t resolve all its concerns. “Confining unlicensed operations in these bands to indoor operations does not address the potential for interference to broadcast operations that may take place indoors” at events, the group said. “Broadcast use for newsgathering operations tends to have high 'RF visibility’ because these links travel over long distances. Such links can easily travel through residential areas where unlicensed operations near windows could cause interference.”

Chairman Ajit Pai gave predecessor Tom Wheeler credit for bringing direct 911 dialing to the FCC's phone system, as Pai and Hank Hunt discussed the story behind Kari's Law in a podcast. Hunt's daughter, Kari Dunn, was murdered by her estranged husband in a hotel bathroom in 2013 as her 9-year-old tried to call 911 unsuccessfully, because the phone system required extra-digit dialing. "In many cases, the fix is pretty easy," Pai said, citing the FCC's 2015 change (see 1505040060). "It essentially just was a case of my predecessor, the former chairman [Tom Wheeler], saying we want to change this and there it was. It was done. And so I think that's part of what struck members of Congress too, saying this is a common-sense fix." The FCC on Sept. 26 adopted an NPRM proposing to implement Kari's Law mandating direct 911 dialing (see 1809260047). Hunt, who played a key advocacy role, wanted to ensure changes didn't "break" business owners: "I don't want someone in a mom-and-pop hotel that's got a 40-room hotel having to spend $10,000 to upgrade." He said whenever he is in a hotel room, he checks to see if the phone system has direct 911 dialing, and talks to the manager if it doesn't: "It's an awareness problem at this point."

Telecom parties sought more FCC leeway to block illegal robocalls while others decried legal "false positive" calls being blocked. Carriers need "flexibility to combat [illegal] calls in multi-faceted and creative ways," CTIA replied, posted in docket 17-59 Wednesday (see 1810090039). It said carriers "combatting illegal robocalls in good faith must have protection from associated legal and regulatory liability; and the ecosystem should not be stifled by rules aimed at addressing false positives," an issue "unlikely to be caused by carrier-initiated blocking." Identify "targeted situations where the consumer benefits of permitting blocking will outweigh any risk of interference with lawful calls," advised NCTA. It urged permitting but not mandating "blocking pursuant to objective criteria developed by providers or industry standard-setting bodies, including the SHAKEN/STIR [Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs/Secure Telephone Identify Revisited] protocol" for call authentication. Voice providers should be empowered to offer access to blocking services "on an opt-out basis to a greater extent than they do today by affirming the permissibility," said the American Cable Association. It noted consumer group support for opt-out that cited few consumers as opting in to blocking. T-Mobile vendor First Orion sought a "balanced" approach to develop "innovative call protection solutions" without regulating call labeling. SiriusXM opposed expanding call-blocking authority, "at least until effective solutions to the problem of false positives have been fully implemented." It said many initial commenters (see 1809250031) minimized "overblocking" problems, as FCC efforts to target spoofed and other illegal calls "inadvertently led to widespread blocking and mislabeling of legitimate calls." It called for adopting "pragmatic recommendations like white lists, intercept messages, Caller ID requirements, and mandatory time frames" for voice providers to respond to complaints and halt blocking of legal calls. Neustar backed the FCC's existing criteria -- "invalid, unallocated, unassigned, and do-not-originate telephone numbers" -- for industry blocking of suspect robocalls. "In other cases, however, although some calls may have characteristics that make them appear to be illegal robocalls, there is high risk that legitimate traffic may be blocked as well. ... It is better to use the Caller ID system to provide information to consumers."