AMG Technology Investment Group, Wisper ISP, Rural Electric Cooperative Consortium and ViaSat will be big recipients in the Connect America Fund Phase II auction, receiving nine-figure support, showed results released Tuesday. The FCC said $1.49 billion will be allocated over the next 10 years to expand rural broadband connectivity to 713,716 unserved homes and small businesses in 45 states. Oklahoma (16 winning bidders), Minnesota (12) and Missouri (11) attracted the most attention, the FCC said. The agency said 53 percent of those unserved homes and small businesses will receive service of at least 100 Mbps download speed, and 19 percent will have 1 Gbps speeds, and 0.25 percent of locations will have speeds of less than 25 Mbps. The 103 providers that were winning bidders must build out 40 percent of the assigned homes and businesses in a state within three years of becoming authorized to receive support, increasing by 20 percent in each subsequent year until completed by the end of year six, the FCC said. Missouri is the biggest recipient of CAF II financial support under the bidding results at $254.8 million to connect 95,130 locations, followed by California at $149 million for 51,682 locations, it said. Missouri will have the most locations connected under the auction, followed by Oklahoma with 70,727. The winners will deliver connectivity "using far less universal service support than the price cap carriers that received model-based support are now doing in the areas they elected to serve," emailed American Cable Association Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman. "That’s a win for consumers and for ensuring limited federal funds are used most efficiently." He said the auction, "while certainly requiring fine-tuning, establishes the paradigm for awarding by auction model-based support in price cap territories when it lapses in a few of years.” The 33 electric co-ops among the CAF II reverse auction winners were the first such ones to receive FCC funding as broadband service providers, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said. The 33 collectively are receiving $220 million over 10 years, it said. “We thank the FCC for allowing electric co-ops to participate," said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. "We are committed to continuing the rural broadband conversation.”

The nationwide combined test of the emergency alert system and wireless emergency alert is scheduled for Sept. 20, the FCC Public Safety Bureau said in a reminder public notice Monday in docket 15-94. The test backup date is Oct. 3, the PN said. Monday was the deadline for all EAS test participants to register with the EAS reporting system and make their initial filings for the test. A second filing is due the day of the test, and a third Nov. 5, the PN said.

An FCC spokesperson countered Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel’s criticism Friday of a Public Safety Bureau report on last year’s hurricane response system. Rosenworcel said it's “too little, too late” (see 1808240052). “Unlike Commissioner Rosenworcel, this FCC prioritizes action,” the spokesperson emailed. “We have made available over $130 million in universal service funding to help recovery efforts, granted more than 900 waivers and requests for Special Temporary Authority to help re-establish communications in hurricane-affected areas, expedited approval of an experimental license for Alphabet’s Project Loon to provide Internet access to residents, approved targeted and flexible E-Rate support to help restore connectivity of schools and libraries, granted temporary waivers of Lifeline’s recertification rules, and accelerated the post-incentive auction transition to support Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Island broadcasters.” After Harvey, Irma and Maria, Chairman Ajit Pai “quickly went to meet with first responders," the spokesperson said, to "find out what the FCC could do to help.”

Major internet players asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to overturn last year’s order repealing 2015 net neutrality rules. The Internet Association filed a brief joined by the Entertainment Software Association, Computer & Communications Industry Association and Writers Guild of America West. The IA-led filing said the FCC was wrong that bright line rules aren’t needed. “The broadband marketplace cannot effectively discipline ISP gatekeepers because a lack of competition and high switching costs prevent even fully-informed consumers from responding to unwanted ISP practices,” they said. “General consumer protection laws provide no clear protection against non-neutral ISP practices so long as they are disclosed, and antitrust laws were neither intended nor designed to address the net neutrality harms at issue here.” The FCC didn’t correctly assess costs of overturning the rules and professed lack of jurisdiction, IA said. “The Commission entirely disclaims authority it possesses under this Court’s precedent, while exceeding its authority under the only source of authority the Order recognized -- the now-repealed Section 257(c) of the Communications Act." The 2015 order wasn’t unprecedented, Consumers Union said. “It implemented the same policy the FCC had been pursuing for more than four decades, using the tool that was available to it -- a tool that the Commission had used before, from 1998-2005.” What was unprecedented was last year’s repeal, CU said. “For the first time since the 1960s, the FCC abandoned the principles of openness, nondiscrimination, and competition central to net neutrality. The resulting 2018 Order’s revision of history ignored nearly a decade of wireline broadband classification under Title II.” USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter slammed the IA pleading. “It’s ironic" the companies that "have become the internet’s most powerful gatekeepers are claiming to fight for a free and open internet that exempts them from the very rules for which they are advocating,” he said. He sought "legislation that provides uniform consumer protections that apply to all companies in the internet ecosystem, and will truly preserve and protect net neutrality principles for all.” Professors and former FCC Chief Technologists Scott Jordan and Jon Peha said it's the agency that didn’t keep up with how technology has evolved. The order “relies on technical assumptions that are no longer valid,” they said. “Consumers today turn almost entirely to providers other than their ISP for e-mail service, web page hosting, discussion forums, and countless other content and application services.” When broadband customers use Gmail, “no email is ‘stored on an Internet service provider's computers’ … so it is Google that provides the information service,” they said.

The FCC’s application fees will change effective Sept. 4 to reflect a 3.7 percent increase to the consumer price index from October 2015 to October 2017, the FCC said in a public notice Friday.

The FCC should modify its biennial report on the 21st Century Communication and Accessibility Act to recognize that more progress is needed on the costs of unlimited data smartphone plans for the hearing impaired and to acknowledge that text-to-911 is critical to allow accessibility in emergencies, said a joint filing in docket 10-213 by a host of consumer groups for the hearing impaired, including Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, and the Cerebral Palsy and Deaf Organization. “Deaf and hard of hearing users disproportionately use data for daily and routine communications out of necessity,” the filing said. The FCC report should also note the progress made on real-time-text technology, the filing said. “We emphasize the importance of incorporating RTT into the native phone capabilities of smartphones as Apple has done, rather than prolonged use of separate apps,” the filing said. The National Federation of the Blind in separate comments said few blind Americans can afford smartphone and data plan costs, and the report should put more emphasis on those cost prohibitions rather than chalking it up to being personal preference. It also said the FCC should create at least one additional secondary audio programming channel for simultaneous broadcast of foreign language and descriptive services and that the agency should institute rules requiring the audio description of live programming.

The FCC is examining some changes in light of the lessons learned during the 2017 hurricane season with its succession of powerful storms, said a Public Safety Bureau report released Friday. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the report falls short. “Let’s not kid ourselves -- releasing this report 85 days into the current hurricane season and as an historic storm gets closer to Hawaii’s shores, is simply too little, too late,” she said. After Katrina, the FCC “established an independent panel that brought to bear a broad background of public safety and industry experiences, including first-hand knowledge of the devastation wrought,” she said. “We didn’t do that here. After Hurricane Sandy, this agency convened a series of field hearings to help inform recommendations and action to improve network resiliency. Again, we didn’t do that here.” The report notes that high cost and severity of last year’s storms. “All told, it was the most expensive hurricane season in United States history, almost doubling the cost of the 2005 hurricane season that included Katrina,” the bureau said. “According to initial estimates, the combined storms caused over $200 billion in damages in the United States and its territories.” Among its recommendations, the report called for “increased engagement” between the FCC and critical infrastructure players. “Cross-sector dependencies greatly affected communications services, which are often highly dependent on electric power, fuel distribution (in the absence of electricity), and transportation at the local level (for access to sites and facilities) and regional level (for transportation of restoration crews and equipment),” the report said. The bureau said the FCC also should encourage backhaul providers to participate in the carriers’ wireless resiliency cooperative framework. The availability of wireless service is sometimes difficult to gauge and the report backed more use of a third-party smartphone app that senses the presence of RF signals in commercial wireless bands. “While initial distribution would be limited to authorized emergency responders deployed to a particular disaster area, the app could ultimately be made available via application stores so that it can be distributed widely,” the bureau said. The report also stressed the importance of over-the-air (OTA) information collection during disasters. Last year, the FCC used “over-the-air technologies such as the National Shared Remote Equipment Network and its High-Frequency Direction-Finding network to collect situational awareness information about emergency communications, including alert system operations,” the report said. This information was then shared with other federal agencies. The bureau “is now considering developing more integrated reporting from the various OTA observation systems which might increase reporting speed and free Roll Call teams for additional scans, analysis and reporting.” The FCC uses Roll Call equipment to examine the spectrum and identify disaster-related communications outages.

As 25 percent tariffs took effect Thursday on a second tranche of Chinese imports worth about $16 billion, CTA, in its toughest words yet, urged the Trump administration to end its “failing” strategy of trying to use the higher duties to punish China. It's “not working” but instead is “damaging” American businesses and consumers, said CTA President Gary Shapiro. It's “failing to change China's behavior” on intellectual property theft, “putting extreme pressure on American innovation and businesses that invent, design and engineer their IP in the United States,” said Shapiro. Of the nearly five dozen line items that CTA asked U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer last month to remove from the second tranche, the final version deleted one: alginic acid and derivatives used for many commercial applications (see 1808080028). CTA and other tech interests are fighting administration efforts to impose a third tranche of 25 percent duties on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, including on IoT-critical connected devices (see 1808220056 or 1808170014). The administration by now "should know something it questioned several months ago: tariffs will not get China to change its unfair trade practices," testified Jonathan Gold, National Retail Federation vice president-supply chain and customer policy, at public hearings Thursday. "Instead, these tariffs threaten to increase costs for American families and destroy the livelihoods of U.S. workers, farmers, manufacturers and small-business owners. There is still time to prevent these harmful consequences. We hope this week’s discussions between the U.S. and China will pave the way for real action that will resolve these ongoing problems and end the trade war before it further escalates."

A pre-Labor Day nominations package that would confirm FCC nominee Geoffrey Starks and Commissioner Brendan Carr's full five-year term ending in 2023 under unanimous consent is still possible, though much depends on the outcome of ongoing negotiations, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Thursday. The Senate recessed Thursday night without a deal following negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., about a nominations package aimed at allowing the chamber to recess for the remainder of August. McConnell vowed earlier Thursday the Senate would “continue to work right through” the rest of the month to confirm a slate of at least 16 of Trump's nominees over Democrats' resistance absent a deal. Thune said he is talking with Schumer and others about getting the two FCC nominees and others under Senate Commerce's jurisdiction included in the package, too, but “at the moment, we don't have a deal yet.” Thune has been hopeful Senate leaders would agree to confirm Carr and Starks under unanimous consent before two previous recesses this summer, but progress on a nominations package has been elusive (see 1807310065). Senate leaders at the last minute scotched a bid to clear the FCC nominees before July 4 (see 1806290037).

Santa Clara County, California, disagreed with Verizon that throttling service to firefighters doesn't relate to net neutrality. Verizon throttled the service during the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest fire in state history, reported County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden in a sworn statement that was an addendum to state and local governments’ net neutrality brief Monday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (see 1808210010). “In the midst of our response to the Mendocino Complex Fire, County Fire discovered the data connection for [Office of Emergency Services] OES 5262 was being throttled by Verizon, and data rates had been reduced to 1/200, or less, than the previous speeds,” Bowden wrote. “These reduced speeds severely interfered with the OES 5262's ability to function effectively.” When Bowden’s IT staff contacted Verizon, the carrier confirmed the throttling, “but, rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan.” Verizon reportedly said it was a customer service mistake to throttle service to public safety -- and it doesn’t usually -- and the situation has nothing to do with net neutrality or the D.C. Circuit case. Santa Clara County counsel James Williams responded: “Verizon’s throttling has everything to do with net neutrality -- it shows that the ISPs will act in their economic interests, even at the expense of public safety. That is exactly what the Trump Administration’s repeal of Net Neutrality allows and encourages.”