The White House unveiled workforce development commitments including by telecom companies and unions Wednesday. AT&T, Corning and Communications Workers of America “are partnering to expand training and create a good jobs pipeline, including by bringing former broadband technicians back into the sector and encouraging companies engaged in AT&T and Corning training programs to attend additional safety courses,” the White House said. AT&T and CWA formed “a task force to design broadband apprenticeship programs, work with community colleges to expand career options for current employees, and streamline tuition reimbursement for AT&T’s union employees,” it said. Lumen will spend about $80 million annually to hire 1,000 employees, “many of them in union jobs,” for expanding fiber. Also, the carrier “will provide hundreds of in-person, hands-on technical training sessions,” the White House said. Charter Communications pledged to increase employee tuition assistance to $10,000 a year and will recruit at three more military bases, said the administration: NTCA and CWA will partner “to make registered apprenticeship more accessible to NTCA member companies. The Fiber Broadband Association and the Wireless Infrastructure Association signed a “a collaborative workforce development agreement to promote registered apprenticeship, develop curriculum, establish industry-recognized credentials and certifications, and articulate career pathways in the broadband industry,” the White House said. “With significant investment from the Biden Administration and strong commitments in place from our industry partners, we can make these highly skilled and technical careers within reach for many more workers, including former technicians who are on the sidelines due to years of job cuts,” said CWA President Chris Shelton. “It is critical not only to diversify our workforce and offer opportunities for economic mobility and job security, but to meet the nation’s urgent need for high-speed fiber broadband in every home.”
NAB has concerns about the FCC’s recently launched proceeding on the potential for expanded use of the 12.7 GHz band (see 2210270046), NAB said in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 22-352. NAB officials met with an aide to Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. As the notice of inquiry “acknowledges, broadcasters currently use spectrum in this band for Broadcast Auxiliary Services (BAS) operations,” NAB said: “As the Commission knows, protection of licensed mobile operations can pose particular challenges -- yet licensed mobile BAS operations are critical to broadcasters’ ability to cover live events and breaking news.” NAB hopes the FCC will “reserve just 55 MHz of the 6 GHz band exclusively for licensed mobile use until real-world data is available to justify the removal of such reservation.” A set-aside “would effectively serve as a pilot program to test the coexistence of unlicensed operations and licensed mobile operations and address our ongoing concerns regarding the potential for harmful interference to licensed mobile operations in the 6 GHz band,” the group said.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, long a critic of China, said Wednesday he's in Taiwan for a series of meetings. Carr said this is the first time a commission member has visited that nation. “Over two days, Carr will meet with his Taiwan counterparts, including officials at the National Communications Commission, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” and “convene meetings with stakeholders in the tech and telecom sectors,” said a news release: “Events will focus on collaboration in the areas of network resiliency, cybersecurity, and 5G, as well as the benefits that Taiwan and America realize from strong, bilateral ties.” Carr also is holding meetings in Hsinchu, the center of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) urged the FCC and wireless industry to partner to expand language accessibility for severe weather alerts. FCC rules currently require carriers to send wireless emergency alerts in English and Spanish. The AG is “deeply concerned” the alerts don’t support other languages, James wrote Wednesday to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and CTIA President Meredith Baker. “In the absence of that capability, immigrant communities across the country -- including an estimated 1.3 million New Yorkers who have limited English proficiency and are not Spanish speakers -- are left without critical information to protect themselves in response to severe weather and other emergency situations.” James earlier sought more languages in a Feb. 23 letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and the National Weather Service’s then acting Director Mary Erickson. Erickson told James that NWS supported sending alerts in more languages, but the FCC would have to update its rules, the AG said. New York City Council Members Sandra Ung and Julie Won agreed in the AG’s news release Thursday. “In my district, where three Asian immigrants lost their lives during Hurricane Ida, 72 percent of the residents are Asian and over 90 percent of Asian senior citizens have limited English proficiency,” said Ung. The Asian American Federation and Asian Americans for Equality also supported the AG’s letter. "Within a WEA message, local alert originators can already today include links to websites with information that warns and informs the public about an emergency in any format, including illustrations or videos and multiple languages," said a CTIA spokesperson: Industry will keep working with the FCC, Federal Emergency Management Agency, New York state "and the broader alert originator community to ensure that WEA messages continue to fulfill their life-saving mission." The FCC didn’t comment.
The U.S. government charged two Chinese intelligence officers with attempting to obstruct a criminal case against Huawei, in the Eastern District of New York, DOJ said Monday. The charges against Guochun He and Zheng Wang were announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and other officials. The agents thought they recruited “an asset,” but the individual was “actually a double agent working on behalf of the FBI,” Garland said at a news conference: “The defendants paid a bribe to the double agent to obtain nonpublic information, including files from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District. They did so in the hope of obtaining the prosecution’s strategy memo, confidential information regarding witnesses, trial evidence and potentially new charges to be brought against” Huawei. The defendants, who are still at large, allegedly paid about $61,000 in Bitcoin bribes to the FBI agent, DOJ said. The complaint said the incident took place after January 2019. In 2020, the U.S. accused Huawei of conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (see 2002130030). If convicted, He faces up to 60 years in prison, Wang up to 20 years, DOJ said. “Anyone still wanna make the case that concerns about Huawei are overblown?” tweeted Michael Sobolik, fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. “Sorry not sorry, Huawei is a tech cancer,” tweeted Nathan Leamer, an aide to former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: “We must secure our networks and kick them out.”
Truphone agreed to divest Russian investors and pay a $600,000 fine for failing to accurately disclose ownership stakes held by foreign entities and transferring control of FCC licenses and international Section 214 authorization without agency approval. In April, the FCC proposed a fine of $660,639 (see 2204210049). The FCC said sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich invested in the company and Truphone didn’t provide timely notice or seek commission approval. “Since 2011, Truphone’s ownership and reports regarding its foreign ownership have changed over time without accurate and requisite reporting to the Commission,” the Enforcement Bureau said in the Thursday order. The FCC is requiring divestiture of any interests held by Abramovich, Alexander Abramov and Alexander Frolov, the agency said. “Pursuing unauthorized transactions that impact foreign ownership, control, or investment in entities that possess FCC authorizations or licenses is one of our top priorities,” said Loyaan Egal, acting chief-Enforcement Bureau. “The terms reached in this settlement agreement reflect the Enforcement Bureau’s continued efforts to work closely with our colleagues in the FCC’s International Bureau" and interagency partners "to ensure that access to the telecommunications services market in the United States remains consistent with U.S. national security and law enforcement interests.”
Plans to update the federal court system's Pacer service include enhanced search functionality such as unified search capability and search technology that's cloud based "both intuitive and user-friendly," Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. Courts Administrative Office director, wrote lawmakers Wednesday. The new search capabilities will allow record searches from a central repository crossing court boundaries, eliminating the need to search for records at each individual federal court, Mauskopf said. The capability will also enable full text searches and searches by judges’ names. "The new search technology will be both easy to use and free for non-commercial users," she said. However, the Open Courts Act "may unduly constrain the effort we have underway," Mauskopf said, noting Congressional Budget Office opinions that eliminating Pacer fees will cost the Judiciary $1 billion over a 10-year period.
Digital twins are already being used and can solve some of the most intractable problems facing cities, said Amen Ra Mashariki, senior principal scientist at tech company Nvidia, during an IEEE conference Tuesday. “You would be shocked what leaders of cities don’t know about their cities,” said Mashariki, former chief analytics officer in New York City. Digital twinsand the metaverse are “solving some of our greatest challenges,” including wildfire prevention, 5G signal propagation, and energy and traffic management, he said. “How do we replicate a city in such a way that we can better understand the city, learn more about the city and then apply solutions that have an impact on the residents?” he asked. A digital twin has to offer “a high level of reality,” he said. Working for New York was difficult because when anything bad happened “it happened big,” he said, citing the cascading problems when COVID-19 hit in 2020. “What digital twins allow you to do is look at the full city,” Mashariki said: “You don’t go in and solve one thing. … You have to solve at least nine, 10, 15 other things in concert.” Digital twins are never “simple to build” and have to be built using “real data,” often crowdsourced, he said. “If I build low-income housing here, how does that affect traffic, how does that affect public safety?” he said. New York City has a right-to-housing law, but people never want homeless shelters in their neighborhoods, Mashariki said. “With simulation, if you have real data, you can actually begin to simulate what opening up shelters in which neighborhoods actually looks like,” he said: “Once you build that shelter you have to then track that data and bring it back into your digital twin. This is the hardest part about a digital twin.” One often-cited example is Ericsson’s construction of digital-twin cities in Sweden, accurate in minute details from the locations of trees to the height and composition of buildings (see 2203150078).
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is visiting Fort Myers, Florida, and Puerto Rico Monday and Tuesday to view recovery efforts from Hurricanes Fiona and Ian. “Rosenworcel’s trip will focus on learning from local stakeholders about how Florida and Puerto Rico’s recovery is progressing, reflecting on what lessons learned the Commission should consider in future natural-disaster related actions," said a Monday news release. The FCC had a virtual field hearing last year after Hurricane Ida (see 2110260067), leading to a July order requiring wireless carriers to participate in the previously voluntary wireless network resiliency cooperative framework and to work out roaming arrangements before disaster strikes (see 2207060070). “Supporting resilient infrastructure has never been more important," Rosenworcel said: "The FCC is committed to supporting recovery efforts and doing all we can to help restore communications networks as quickly as possible."
FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips formally ended his tenure at the commission Friday, after announcing his resignation in August (see 2208090061 and 2208170039). Phillips, who joined the commission in 2018, was a “voice of reason” at the epicenter of a “lively and historic debate on issues of profound significance” at the FTC, said Commissioner Christine Wilson.