Vonage provided detailed information to FCC Wireline Bureau staff Monday about the effect of a waiver on intercarrier compensation and access charges, an ex parte filing said (http://xrl.us/bnktdz). Vonage has long been petitioning for direct access to phone numbers from the North American Numbering Plan or the pooling administrator (CD March 11/11 p11). Direct access to numbers will change intercarrier compensation in two respects, Vonage said: The VoIP provider will seek bill-and-keep arrangements where it’s able to negotiate IP interconnection agreements, and will not seek to bill for end-office access elements or to collect reciprocal compensation for inbound traffic. Neither of these changes “endangers third-party rights to intercarrier compensation,” Vonage said. CLEC concerns about losing access charges on calls to or from Vonage-assigned numbers are “significantly overstated,” Vonage said, providing detailed figures that were redacted in the public filing. The intercarrier compensation “will not go away immediately,” it said, because the voluntary direct IP arrangements with carrier partners will take time, it said. Since the commission’s stated goal is to move all compensation to a bill-and-keep regime, a delay in granting the waiver would slow the transition to IP interconnection and impede the shift to bill-and-keep “in order to protect the business model of a small number of carriers,” Vonage said.
FCC Wireline Bureau staff asked questions Tuesday about the application of Yourtel America and TerraCom’s joint application to participate in the Broadband Adoption Lifeline Pilot Program, said an ex parte filing made by the Kansas City, Mo., and Oklahoma City telcos (http://xrl.us/bnktda). Commission staff asked about proposed plan rates and subsidies, the process regarding customer signup and choice of hardware, obtaining consent to collect data from program participants, certification of Lifeline eligibility, training and proposed collaboration with Connected Nation, and the handling of survey questions.
Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., urged Senate leadership to support the free and open Internet by passing legislation that solidifies U.S. policy against international governance of the Web. Bono Mack’s plea came in a letter sent Tuesday to Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Congress must act quickly to prevent the ITU from enacting changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations that could subject the Web to international governmental control, the letter said. “If we are not vigilant those changes could set back the remarkable social and economic advances that the Internet has facilitated throughout the world,” Bono Mack said. In August the House voted 414-0 to pass H.Con. Res. 127, which urges the NTIA director and the State Department coordinator for international communications and information policy to continue to advance “the consistent and unequivocal policy of the United States to promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful multi stakeholder model that governs the Internet today.” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced the Senate counterpart to the House resolution in June (http://xrl.us/bni6jb).
The NCTA clarified some of the commitments made by the top six cable operators in the basic tier encryption proceeding, an ex parte notice shows (http://xrl.us/bnkp2r). “With respect to the suggestion that the Operators deploying equipment pursuant to Option #1 [of their proposed commitments] provide advance notice of the network protocols being used, the Operators would not object to the Commission stating its expectation that prior to deploying operator-supplied equipment ... Operators will publicly disclose the DLNA profile or other protocol that is being used for the home-networking capability on such operator-supplied equipment,” the notice said. “We objected to other suggestions that would unnecessarily expand the scope of this proceeding and/or that would hinder the Commission’s ability to bring this proceeding to a conclusion as quickly as possible,” it said.
Digital Management said Tuesday it bought Mission Critical Wireless, which the company said will help it expand its mobile computing management business. Mission Critical Wireless focuses on mobile infrastructure and mobile device management, Digital Management said in a news release. “In the incredibly fast-paced world of enterprise mobility, it’s clear that organizations need expert solution partners to deliver complete, customized turn-key solutions and services,” Digital Management CEO Jay Sunny Bajaj said. “We anticipate tremendous demand for our integrated services which are now unrivalled [sic] in the marketplace” (http://xrl.us/bnkp2n).
Mediacom said it offered to buy back up to $300 million of debt through its Mediacom Broadband LLC and Mediacom Broadband Corp. subsidiaries. The tender offer for its 8.5 percent notes due 2015 will expire Sept. 12, it said. It also proposed a new $300 million bond issue to fund the debt buyback. Moody’s gave the new bonds a B3 rating.
To enhance the role of minorities in telecom and media enterprises, people must recognize the enormity of the problem of media exclusion, pressure the FCC to get serious about finding solutions, and make diversity a priority in everything the FCC does, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in a Benton Foundation blog post Monday (http://xrl.us/bnkpy5). “We have to develop a sense of national urgency about this problem,” he wrote. “Our country is now nearly one-third minority -- yet minority issues and cultural contributions receive shockingly sparse attention in our media.” Copps urged the FCC to update the Adarand studies compiled in 2000, which examined market entry barriers faced by minority- and women-owned small businesses in the telecom industry. “These are not issues to push under the rug until the election is past,” he wrote.
The FCC stayed the effective date of certain aspects of its Comcast Bloomberg neighborhooding carriage order, which was set to take effect Aug. 15. Pending the FCC’s action on each party’s application for review the FCC stayed the neighborhooding order “with respect to any headend that (i) carries BTV SD, (ii) does not carry BTV SD in an SD news neighborhood, (iii) has multiple news neighborhoods (regardless of whether those neighborhoods are HD or SD), and (iv) has no vacant channel adjacent to any SD news neighborhood,” a memorandum opinion and order released Tuesday said (http://xrl.us/bnkpy7). The order also gave Comcast more time to comply with the order on headends with a single standard-definition news neighborhood and no adjacent vacant channels, it said. For the rest of Comcast headends subject to the order, Comcast’s stay request is moot “because Comcast has completed its compliance on those headends,” the order said. The commission’s Tuesday order, coupled with the FCC’s initial neighborhood order, is a “big win for the public and independent programmers,” Greg Babyak, head of government affairs at Bloomberg LP, said in an e-mailed statement. “We urge Comcast to comply with the remaining obligations under the Merger Order, and urge Chairman Genachowski and the Commission to address the remaining issues with dispatch."
Sprint Nextel said it plans to retire $1.5 billion in notes on Aug. 24. The debt includes nearly $473 million in Nextel notes originally due in 2013 and $1 billion in Nextel notes due in 2015, the carrier said in a news release Tuesday. After that debt is retired, Sprint Nextel said it will still have $1.1 billion in outstanding debt on 2015 notes (http://xrl.us/bnkpyr).
Stations owned by Sinclair are scheduled to be dropped from the Dish Network programming lineup in the early morning hours on Thursday, after which a retransmission consent agreement between Sinclair and Dish is scheduled to expire. Dish carries about 70 Sinclair-owned stations, including affiliates of CBS, ABC and Fox, in more than 40 markets, Sinclair said Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bnkpzs). The prices that Sinclair requested “are substantially lower than the amounts Dish is paying for other far less popular channels it carries as a result of Dish’s flawed economic model that on a relative basis compensates channels with little to no audience share more than the broadcast channels,” it said. Dish said it negotiated with the broadcaster for months, “but Sinclair is insisting on a rate increase that would force Dish to pay more for those ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC channels than Dish pays to any other broadcaster” (http://xrl.us/bnkp2a). Sinclair suggested to its viewers they can turn to services like DirecTV, Verizon’s FiOS or AT&T’s U-Verse, to keep seeing the TV stations on subscription-video providers.