INDIANAPOLIS -- USF stakeholders scrutinized Viasat participation in an FCC auction of subsidies for voice and broadband to underserved rural America because they said the satellite provider indicates it could struggle to provide high-quality phone service. Viasat was such a major participant by some metrics it might have skewed the results, some said on a NARUC panel Tuesday and in follow-up interviews. The company seeks some related changes from the FCC. With the agency's members likely to vote next week on rules for the next high-cost auction, one consultant suggested Viasat not be included.
5G will mean fundamental changes to the overall communications industry, speakers predicted Tuesday at a Georgetown University Center for Business and Public Policy event. They also agreed the race to 5G is real and the U.S. must win.
The Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (Data) Act (S-1822) and two 5G security bills are expected to easily advance during a Wednesday Senate Commerce Committee executive session (see 1907180054), lawmakers and lobbyists told us. Some said they now believe the markup process is unlikely to result in any substantial changes to S-1822, after earlier hiccups. The other measures up for markup are the Secure 5G and Beyond Act (S-893) and the U.S. 5G Leadership Act (S-1625). The executive session is to begin at 10:30 a.m. in 216 Hart.
Proposed changes to how the FCC collects broadband deployment data should be some improvement over the oft-criticized Form 477-centric approach, though it also opens a potential can of worms with its crowdsourcing component, experts told us. Others see a catastrophic failure in the agency's not bringing retail pricing data into the mix. "It's tweaking a broken system," said Penn State telecom professor Sascha Meinrath. The proposal's on the FCC agenda for Aug. 1 (see 1907110071).
INDIANAPOLIS -- A now-combined state telecom commissioners' resolution asking the FCC to halt changes to the billion-dollar-a-year phone and broadband program for the poor passed its NARUC committee unanimously, in minutes. Such quick passage, while not atypical, shows lack of controversy among industry and state regulators for waiting on Lifeline revamps, attendees told us. There was no public discussion immediately before the vote and no one abstained, another sign stakeholders are on the same page, they noted.
Equifax will pay between $575 million and $700 million to settle claims for its 2017 data breach (see 1803010033), the FTC announced Monday in a joint settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and 50 states and territories. Equifax failed to secure massive amounts of personal data with basic safeguards, the FTC alleged in its complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Data included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and physical addresses, exposing some 147 million consumers to identity theft and fraud risks, the agency said.
Massive changes in the global domain name system are causing connectivity problems, stakeholders said. The burgeoning number of top-level domains (TLDs) with more than three characters behind the dot (such as .connectivity) and the growing number of internationalized domain names (IDNs) in non-ASCII characters means not all domain names and email addresses work in all applications, they said. Universal acceptance (UA) is now a key issue for ICANN, standards bodies and the domain industry in general. It's the "concept that all domain names should be treated equally," and that domains and email addresses should be accepted, stored, processed and displayed in "a consistent and effective manner," said the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG).
Municipal and electric cooperative pole attachment rates either chill rural broadband deployment, and their exemption from Section 224 of the Communications Act needs to end, or those rates are a nonissue. Those are the competing NCTA and National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) narratives before the FCC, with NCTA on Monday filing a 49-page study in docket 17-83 documenting notably higher pole attachment rates muni and co-op electric companies charge over investor-owned utilities.
INDIANAPOLIS -- As they extend broadband to hard-to-serve areas, some with subsidies from states and the FCC, ISPs are aiming to upgrade speeds, working in public-private partnerships and getting pole space from electric cooperatives and others. Some providers are doing this using multiple technologies, including fiber and licensed and unlicensed spectrum, they said on a NARUC panel Monday. They said state telecom commissions are generally easy to work with and one speaker identified some challenges at the federal level.
The FCC should equitably address discrepancies between the number of rural locations a broadband provider is funded to serve after alternative Connect America cost model (A-CAM) auctions and the number of actual locations the provider encounters during a network build-out phase, industry said in comments to FCC posted through Monday in docket 10-90, rather than impose penalties to providers when pre-bidding estimates turn out to be wrong (see 1907110003). The agency's Wireline Bureau "should study the impact of actual location discrepancies before deciding what measures are appropriate for A-CAM support recipients that experience location shortfalls," ITTA said.