A March FCC order on wireless infrastructure attracted reconsideration petitions this week from localities, a major American Indian tribe and a tower company in docket 17-79. NATOA said the order isn’t in the public interest, fails to acknowledge existing limits and ignores impact of dense deployments in small areas, among other problems. It “will inflict serious injury” on tribes, said the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. The move is a “step forward,” but the FCC should have stepped further, said T-Mobile unit and tower company PTA-FLA. Residents of Montgomery County, Maryland, also sought reconsideration due to concerns including about possible radiation from RF emissions.
September's expiration of DOJ-imposed behavioral conditions on Comcast's buy of NBCUniversal will unleash a vertically integrated behemoth with plenty of incentive to squash competition, panelists said at a Public Knowledge-organized panel Wednesday. There were no Comcast-friendly voices, and much discussion involved how to extend the conditions or whether broader changes are needed in antitrust enforcement. “Beware Comcast unleashed,” said American Cable Association Senior Vice President Ross Lieberman.
Call it a distributed denial of service, a "bot swarm" or "something hammering" the FCC electronic comment filing system application programming interface, it's clear "something odd" occurred in May 2017, former Chief Information Officer David Bray wrote Tuesday. He responded to a report based on a Freedom of Information Act request that the agency misled media about a possible DDoS attack on its commenting system (see 1806050046). The thousand-plus pages of emails in that FOIA from American Oversight, which we reviewed, show executives from at least four software and cybersecurity firms effectively pitched their services to the agency in the days after the 2017 DDoS incident.
Commissioner Mignon Clyburn's “closing statement” Wednesday summed up her accomplishments at the FCC and her regrets. Though Clyburn announced she was leaving, sat out the May meeting and held a farewell ceremony last month, she has continued to vote on some things, attend events as a commissioner (see 1805180042) and issued a call for ISP data for low-income broadband package subscriber information earlier in the day. Though the statement is labeled a closing one, and reads like a farewell, it doesn’t expressly say Clyburn is now officially stepping down. Her office didn’t comment.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed hiking a USF Rural Health Care cap by 43 percent, from $400 million to $571 million per year, to reflect inflation since program inception in 1997. He circulated a draft order to increase the cap for the current (2017) funding year ending June 30, index the program for inflation going forward and allow unused funds from prior years to be carried forward to future years, said a release Wednesday. It noted recent demand exceeded the budget, creating uncertainty for participants. Rural healthcare (RHC) and telco interests welcomed the announcement.
Officials from the German and Austrian embassies in Washington had contrasting predictions Tuesday for the future of autonomous vehicles in Europe. The German official told an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event that Americans are more willing to accept a trial-and-error approach for AV deployment.
LAS VEGAS -- Technology in the enterprise and connected home is converging, creating opportunities and challenges for integrators serving both, said panelists at an event at Infocomm Tuesday. Bring-your-own-device policies at work are driving convergence, leading consumers to want familiar experiences and user interfaces (UI) all over, said Parks Associates' Brad Russell. The analyst is often shocked in hotel rooms by the “abysmal” UIs on hotel TVs vs. what’s available to consumers at home, a “step back in time.” Consumers should be able to port content preferences, he said.
Major parties urged the FCC to end two remaining rural call completion duties of providers covered by a 2013 order, after the agency ordered in April that their data reporting requirements be eliminated. CTIA, ITTA, NCTA, Sprint and USTelecom said the data recordkeeping and retention obligations should be scrapped, and Verizon said they should be reduced. NTCA opposed that. Parties offered various views on implementing the Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act, in comments posted Monday and Tuesday in docket 13-39 on a Further NPRM attached to the April order, which made covered originating long-distance providers accountable for intermediate carrier performance (see 1804170025 and 1804180025).
That media and telco companies now have to release data publicly about what their median employees make and how that compares with the CEO's pay package likely won't change their compensation approaches for either those at the top or for average workers, experts told us. The numbers could be fodder in ongoing populist movements like gender pay equality and living wage issues, said Deborah Lifshey, a managing director at executive compensation consultancy Pearl Meyer.
House Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Mike Doyle, D-Pa., pushed the committee's Republican leaders Tuesday to “immediately reschedule” a House Communications-led FCC oversight hearing originally planned for Feb. 16. It was postponed after House leaders canceled votes planned for that day, ending that week's schedule earlier than anticipated (see 1802120037). House Communications' last such hearing was in late October (see 1710250050).