The California Public Utilities Commission adequately oversees its LifeLine database, it told the FCC in a Wednesday supplement to its petition to opt out of the National Lifeline Accountability Database (http://bit.ly/XPBVJr). The filing intended to show the FCC how the state’s LifeLine administrator “1) receives and processes subscriber information provided by service providers to identify whether a subscriber is receiving or is in the process of receiving a California LifeLine benefit from another service provider; 2) handles descriptive addresses; 3) performs monthly scrubs to detect duplicative Lifeline support; and 4) administers the Lifeline household worksheet,” the CPUC said. It described its validation process and the ways it checks for duplicates. The CPUC “plans to verify a subscriber’s identity through a third-party identity verification service” soon, it added.
David Medine’s nomination to chair the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will be taken up by the Senate Judiciary Committee at its Feb. 28 business meeting, the committee said Thursday. The hearing will be held at 10 a.m. in Dirksen room 226. Medine, a partner at WilmerHale and former White House National Economic Council senior adviser, was renominated by President Barack Obama last month. Judiciary Republicans blocked his confirmation last year, citing “serious concerns” about Medine’s views on profiling foreign nationals from high-risk countries (CD May 18 p11).
Phones operating on the Android and iOS operating systems comprised 91.1 percent of all smartphones shipped in Q4, International Data Corp. (IDC) said Thursday. Android vendors and Apple shipped 207.6 million smartphones globally in Q4 -- up from 122 million at the same time in 2011, IDC said. Vendors for the two systems shipped 87.6 percent of the smartphones shipped worldwide during all of 2012, up from a 68.1 percent share in 2011. Those figures showed “the dominance of Android and Apple reached a new watermark” during the quarter, said Ramon Llamas, IDC’s mobile phone research manager, in a news release. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry’s BlackBerry 10 operating systems are “poised for competition,” but it will take time to make up ground Android and Apple have gained, IDC said. “There is no question the road ahead is uphill for both Microsoft and BlackBerry, but history shows us consumers are open to change,” said Ryan Reith, IDC’s program manager-Mobile Device Trackers. “Platform diversity is something not only the consumers have asked for, but also the operators” (http://xrl.us/bogyqh).
Western Pacific Broadcast wants three-week delays to reply to the FCC to oppositions from Armstrong Utilities and Blue Ridge Cable to must-carry complaints for WACP Atlantic City, N.J., so the broadcaster and each cable operator can talk about ways to resolve signal-strength issues. The replies would be due March 6, Western Pacific said in filings in dockets 12-364 (http://bit.ly/VUhsHk) and 12-365 (http://bit.ly/XFDATP). “To be fruitful, these discussions must involve a further exchange of engineering information and an analysis of the information by both parties, which will require additional time,” each filing said. “There is a possibility these discussions will result in an agreement between the parties that will informally resolve this dispute.” Western Pacific on Wednesday got a preliminary nod from the Media Bureau to move another station -- also won in the FCC’s most recent TV-station auction but, unlike WACP, not built out -- within Delaware (CD Feb 14 p15).
The Senate Commerce Committee is studying how to allocate spectrum between federal agencies and mobile broadband operators, Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Wednesday at the committee’s first meeting during the 113th Congress. Rockefeller said ((http://xrl.us/bogyh4) he and Ranking Member John Thune, R-S.D., “are working right now on setting up a classified briefing for Members that will help us understand how the military, law enforcement, and the intelligence community currently use spectrum that is reserved for the government."
Communications Daily will observe the federal Washington’s Birthday holiday on Monday, Feb. 18. Our next issue will be Tuesday, Feb. 19.
Cloud computing is a “double-edged sword” from a critical information infrastructure protection (CIIP) perspective, the European Network and Information Security Agency said Thursday in a report on critical cloud computing. Large cloud providers can deploy state-of-the-art security and resilience measures and spread the associated costs among customers, but if an outage or security breach occurs, the consequences can be massive, it said. The report (http://bit.ly/11IJoQZ) examined various scenarios and threats relevant from a CIIP standpoint, based on a survey of public sources on take-up of cloud computing and large cyberattacks, and disruptions to cloud services. It drew several conclusions, among them that cloud computing is critical because the vast majority of organizations will soon use it; millions of users are affected by breaches and disruptions; and the cloud is being adopted in critical sectors such as finance, energy and transport. One key benefit of the cloud is its resilience to regional power cuts or local natural disasters, the report found. Clouds are also elastic, allowing them to cope with load and lessening the risk of overload or distributed denial-of-service attacks, it said. But the impact of cyberattacks is multiplied by the concentration of resources which result from use of cloud computing, it said. The most critical services are large operating system and application servers-as-a-service, which deliver services to other information technology vendors who in turn serve millions of organizations and users. Cloud computing isn’t immune to administrative or legal issues, the report found. A legal dispute involving the provider or a customer could affect the data of all other co-customers, it said. The European Commission CIIP action plan calls for discussion about cloud computing governance strategies, it said. ENISA recommended that governance be split into three processes: (1) Making a risk assessment to determine which infrastructures are critical, what their value is to the economy and society, and what kinds of incidents need to be prevented. (2) Taking security measures to prevent large incidents or mitigate their impact. (3) Collecting incident reports in order to understand weakness in security measures and evaluate risk assessments. These processes can by supervised by a government authority such as a regulator, or some industry association such as a body of auditors, it said. The report included recommendations related to each governance prong. ENISA plans to launch a new working group on CIIP and governmental cloud security, it said.
Correction: Level 3 and Bandwidth.com do not believe that questions concerning the issue of direct assignment of number resources to non-carriers must be addressed before the issue of IP interconnection is resolved (CD Feb 13 p10). Both CLECs have urged the commission to resolve IP interconnection issues on an expedited basis in a manner that includes number assignment issues, as well.
Granting Vonage direct access to telephone numbers would give the FCC’s technology transitions task force “valuable, real-world data on the transition to IP networks,” the telecom provider told FCC officials Friday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/Vbj8Mk). Vonage has faced difficulties as a result of lack of direct access, it said: Carriers don’t know which numbers are Vonage numbers, which “creates hurdles to IP interconnection.” Suggestions that Vonage depend on CLECs to obtain IP interconnection is “misplaced” because CLECs have little reason to pursue the end-to-end IP interconnection subjection to bill-and-keep compensation that Vonage is seeking, it said. And indirect IP interconnection through a CLEC doesn’t offer the same service quality that direct interconnection arrangements offer, it said. “The myriad objections raised by the CLECs to Vonage obtaining direct access to telephone numbers including number exhaust, routing, and intercarrier compensation have already been comprehensively addressed,” it said. “There is no reason for further delay."
An FCC waiver for a broadcaster that won the last two TV stations auctioned to change the community of license within Delaware of the one outlet the company hasn’t built out, “would serve the public interest,” said a Media Bureau rulemaking notice Wednesday. Waiving the agency’s freeze on such DTV channel changes wouldn’t require “additional technical changes,” said the notice seeking comment on Western Pacific Broadcast’s request to move WMDE from Seaford to Dover. Western Pacific also owns WACP Atlantic City, N.J., seeking guaranteed pay-TV system carriage in the Philadelphia area and, unlike WMDE, on air. An order (http://fcc.us/12AhUbb) also from the bureau’s Video Division denied the Broadcast Maximization Committee’s request to undo the 2010 allotment of Channel 5 in Delaware to Seaford. BMC wants that channel and channel 6 used for radio, not DTV. The section of the Communications Act the allotment was meant to address, that there be a commercial VHF station in every state, “poses a somewhat unique circumstance compared to other allocations,” said the order signed by Division Chief Barbara Kreisman. “To the extent that a proposed allocation of this sort is unusual, BMC does not identify any impropriety or legal barrier to the adoption of a new approach.” Western Pacific and PMCM, which unsuccessfully sought to move two western U.S. TV stations to Delaware and New Jersey so the commission would comport with that section of the act after the DTV transition, both are represented by the Fletcher Heald law firm. PMCM in December won a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruling that reversed the agency’s denial of that cross-country community of license move (CD Dec 17 p4). BMC hasn’t decided whether to sue the FCC in an appeals court over the denial of its petition for reconsideration, said Mark Lipp of Wiley Rein, representing the council. Lawyers for PMCM and Western Pacific had no comment right away. Comments are due in 30 days after the rulemaking appears in the Federal Register, replies 15 days later, the notice said (http://fcc.us/X4rSkj).