Verizon Wireless is relinquishing its status as an eligible telecom carrier in Iowa as of Dec. 31. The company is changing its status “because its universal service funding will be eliminated at the end of this year under the terms of the Alltel Acquisition Order” from the FCC, said a Friday filing to the Iowa Utilities Board (http://1.usa.gov/RGe682). Verizon Wireless has been an Iowa ETC carrier since 2002, the filing said. It promised the forthcoming change will “have no impact on Verizon Wireless’ network coverage in Iowa, and there will be no impact on Verizon Wireless’ announced, industry-leading roll-out of 4G LTE broadband and voice services.” Some Lifeline customers will be affected, but “several alternatives” exist, Verizon Wireless said. Current Lifeline subscribers can continue receiving their current rates for one year after the change, the company said.
The FCC should dismiss or deny a petition by George Flinn that it reconsider a Media Bureau order excluding Flinn’s WFBD-TV Destin, Fla., from the Mobile-Pensacola market for must-carry purposes and deny the station’s must-carry complaint, Comcast said (http://xrl.us/bnqtyq). The petition for reconsideration is “both procedurally defective and substantively without merit,” Comcast said. The petition wasn’t filed within 30 days of the bureau’s order, it said. Furthermore, the petition provided no material basis to reverse the bureau’s decision, Comcast said. “Instead the Petition merely rehashes the arguments the Station made in its Opposition to Comcast’s Petition for Special Relief, arguments that the Bureau properly considered and rejected."
The licensee of KVMD-TV Twentynine Palms, Calif., asked to be let out of the FCC’s commercial loudness rules for a year. The station owner said it qualifies as a small business because of its annual revenue, and needs a one-year waiver to be able to afford the equipment needed to comply with the rules. The rules were set up by the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association again urged the FCC to quickly adopt a 2 GHz order that will allow Dish Network to build a terrestrial service with wireless spectrum. CCIA executives met Wednesday with staff from the offices of Commissioners Ajit Pai and Jessica Rosenworcel, CCIA said in ex parte filings in docket 12-70 (http://xrl.us/bnqtvv) (http://xrl.us/bnqtv5). Although potential future interference issues relating to the 2 GHz spectrum currently licensed to Dish will eventually require resolution, “forcing Dish to move in a 5 MHz upward shift now would require a do-over of the standards setting process already nearing successful completion,” CCIA said. The commission should reach a solution that doesn’t close the door on the future H block licensing and operations or delay Dish’s proposed deployment of a new mobile broadband network, it said. FCC staff continue working on an order to waive requirements so that Dish can build out its satellite network for terrestrial wireless service, and are weighing whether to require the company to move its uplink frequencies by 5 MHz up to 2005-2025 MHz (CD Sept 19 p6).
Two Virginia counties are struggling with their phone service after Verizon’s equipment malfunctioned, the company said late Thursday. “Due to faulty network equipment in the Sandston office, customers in the area may have trouble completing and receiving landline calls,” said Verizon, saying the office serves about 5,500 customer lines (http://xrl.us/bnqtbf). “The issue is not affecting wireless calling, High Speed Internet (DSL) service, FiOS Internet, FiOS TV or FiOS Digital Voice customers.” Verizon said 911 service remains intact. The two affected counties are Eastern Hanover and Henrico, the company said. It declined to estimate when service will be restored. “Technicians from Verizon and the equipment vendor have restored some circuits, enabling customers to make and receive more landline calls, and these technicians will continue to bring service back until all is restored,” it said.
The net neutrality debate has expanded to encompass the need to reconcile the Internet’s fundamental principles of openness and freedom with its growth and the necessity of protecting the quality of access to services it supplies, French telecom regulator ARCEP said Thursday in a report (http://xrl.us/bnqs3o) to the Parliament and government on the technical and economic issues fueling the discussion. In September 2010, ARCEP published 10 proposals aimed at defining a sustainable, neutral and high-quality equilibrium to ensure the Internet’s functioning, it said. That launched a period of work on and monitoring of Internet players’ practices on transparency, quality of service (QoS), interconnection and traffic management, it said. A dynamic and competitive market, capable of keeping ISPs disciplined, is essential to the existence of quality Internet access products that respect net neutrality, it said. The transparency of offers to consumers still needs improvement, it said. ARCEP and other public authorities responsible for e-communications and consumer affairs are leading a working group on the issue that should produce results in early 2013, it said. But competition and transparency aren’t enough to guarantee net neutrality, so the regulator will approve a decision by year’s end that specifies QoS indicators for fixed networks, which will be measured and made public as they are for mobile networks. ARCEP may also set minimum QoS requirements if needed, it said. It has also launched an inventory of traffic management practices such as throttling, blocking or priority queues, it said. These are on the decrease, particularly on mobile networks, but some practices still breach its 2010 criteria, it said. It urged operators to stop blocking VoIP and peer-to-peer services, warning that if the market fails to act, ARCEP has the legislative authority to intervene. The interconnection business model is gradually evolving and can give rise to conflicts, but monitoring, not regulation, is what’s needed at this point, it said. ARCEP is also keeping tabs on the specific role of content and application providers and device manufacturers in preserving net neutrality. It’s taking a “progressive” approach to net neutrality, based first on immediate preventive actions aimed at promoting competition and transparency, and then on enabling Internet companies, operators, and content and app providers to appeal to the regulator for dispute resolution in traffic management and interconnection disputes, it said. The third leg of ARCEP’s approach is to regulate if general or discriminatory QoS degradation is found, it said. It’s up to Parliament to decide what to do about net neutrality, ARCEP said. But if lawmakers decide to turn guiding principles into law, they should avoid “overly-detailed provisions that could prove difficult, if not impossible, to implement in a sector that is in a constant state of technological and economic flux."
The ITU-T study group on telecom economic and policy issues will start new work to compile information on measures that could be used to reduce the cost of international Internet connectivity, we've learned. The group will look at the impact of regulatory frameworks and arrangements on costs, a document said. The work may examine certain benchmark studies on the costs of international Internet connectivity, it said. Strategies that could help reduce costs include the setting up Internet exchange points, the development of local hosting and applications, access to landing points for submarine cables, mirror sites and caches, investment in networks and submarine cables, and implementation of a related ITU-T recommendation, it said. The recommendation suggests administrations involved in the provision of international Internet connections negotiate and agree to bilateral commercial arrangements that take into account the possible need for compensation between them “for the value of elements such as traffic flow, number of routes, geographical coverage and cost of international transmission amongst others.”
Entercom’s deal Thursday to share terrestrial radio revenue with the Big Machine country-genre music label (CD Sept 21 p18) is “pretty smart,” an analyst wrote Friday. The pact includes a terrestrial broadcast performance royalty that “music labels have long been fighting for in exchange for lower internet streaming rates,” Marci Ryvicker of Wells Fargo wrote investors. “Our sense is that the economics of this deal improve as more listeners migrate online.” Also following Clear Channel, which signed a deal with the label recently, others likely will “join the party at some point,” she wrote. After attending the NAB Radio show in Dallas last week where she met with industry executives, “almost every operator” said political ads have “been slow to come to radio, and September may be disappointing,” Ryvicker wrote. “There has been some shift of political dollars out of radio towards local cable TV.”
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) stakeholders should consider building short-term personal data retention policies into “Do Not Track” standards currently being considered, FTC Commissioner Julie Brill said during a State of the Net West event at Santa Clara University Thursday. Stakeholders at the W3C should “consider whether after a short time frame, let’s say 30 days for instance,” companies should be required to render data unlinkable to individuals or devices “or to delete it altogether,” Brill said. “The FTC has always noted the importance of data minimization as a way to enhance data security,” Brill said. “Retention periods … promote good data security practices,” she said as one rationale for adopting them. “Second, appropriate retention periods will provide consumers with the certainty that their data will not be maintained indefinitely until companies can figure out how to monetize it,” she said. That in turn will help build trust between the industry and consumers, she said. The FTC recognizes that certain constituencies need exemptions from W3C privacy policies for security, fraud prevention and frequency capping -- limiting how many times the same person sees the same ad -- purposes, Brill said. But other W3C stakeholders have called for other exemptions for market research and product improvement purposes, she said. If allowed, such exemptions need to be clearly defined, she said. “We need to make sure these permitted usages are not given such broad meaning that they become exceptions that swallow the rule,” she said. “The advertising networks are the only ones who can make the case for such use. Without input from them, it will be hard to see how such uses can be justified when a consumer has opted out of tracking,” she said. It’s important these sorts of issues get resolved, Brill said. “So much progress has been made, and so much hard work [has gone] into this … it would be a shame if all that progress was wasted by an inability to resolve these remaining issues,” Brill said. “It wouldn’t benefit the industry and it wouldn’t benefit consumers.” Beyond the agency’s Do Not Track efforts, which involve limiting the ability of third-parties to track a person’s Internet usage across websites or applications, Brill said she has some concerns about the amount of personal information companies are collecting directly from users. “I do have concerns when the vast amount of information is used for purposes that either fit squarely within purposes that we as a society have said consumers ought to have heightened protections” for, or for purposes that fall close to those areas, such as employment, credit and housing, she said.
Comcast is working with the Boys & Girls Club of Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia, Urban Affairs Coalition, YMCA of Philadelphia and Vicinity, and other groups to sell its $9.95 monthly broadband service to the poor in the area, where 3,250 families buy the product. This is the second year the operator, which agreed to start the Internet Essentials program to get FCC approval to buy control of NBCUniversal, and the city are promoting the service, Comcast said Friday (http://xrl.us/bnqs32).