ORLANDO -- The National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates approved resolutions at its annual meeting Tuesday on the need for fair policies in the upcoming incentive auction and giving VoIP providers direct access to phone numbers. The IP transition dominated the telecom discussions at the NASUCA meeting, with panels on who controls the IP transition and Verizon’s Voice Link service on Fire Island, N.Y., and the New Jersey barrier islands.

The author of a wide-ranging surveillance overhaul vigorously defended the bill and called Tuesday for votes in both houses of Congress. Speaking at a Georgetown Law Center event, House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., criticized a series of what he considered abuses his USA Freedom Act, HR-3361, would fix. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., worked with Sensenbrenner and introduced its companion, S-1599. House and Senate leaders should “give Pat Leahy and me an up-or-down vote on the Freedom Act,” declared Sensenbrenner, the original Patriot Act author. “And I bet when we get that, we'll win.”

DENVER -- Judges seemed generally receptive Tuesday to FCC arguments that the agency acted reasonably when it implemented its landmark 2011 Connect America Fund order. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel spent several hours hearing challenges to the order, which rewrote the $4.5 billion USF and set intercarrier compensation on a path toward bill and keep. As judges told challengers that ambiguous terms in the Telecom Act should be resolved in favor of reasonable FCC interpretation, challengers responded either that the terms weren’t ambiguous or the interpretation wasn’t reasonable.

The FCC should do a survey of broadcasters to determine the “pricing and capabilities of broadcaster equipment,” as part of the process of creating a “fairly exhaustive” catalog of expenses to be reimbursed after the post-incentive auction, said CTIA in reply comments filed in docket 12-268 before Monday’s comment deadline. The FCC needs to expand the “Catalog of Eligible Expenses” to ensure broadcaster certainty about the repacking process, and a survey is the best way to ensure the catalog’s comprehensiveness, said CTIA. The American Cable Association, NCTA and a group of broadcasters also backed the catalog to consider costs for multichannel video programming distributors broadly. If a wide range of costs aren’t reimbursed, the repacking’s detrimental effects on broadcasters “will lead directly to less and lower quality local service to all affected communities,” said a group of stations owned by Block Communications.

As the FCC begins sorting through low-power FM permit applications submitted during the Oct. 17-Nov. 15 filing period, LPFM hopefuls can expect the selection of mutually exclusive groups to be a lengthy process, some attorneys and LPFM advocates said. The filing window closed last week after it was extended for one day after the Consolidated Database System crashed (CD Nov 18 p23). The Media Bureau plans to disclose the number of applications it received in about one week, an FCC spokeswoman said. The process to identify singletons is expected to begin in the next several weeks, she said. This will allow the commission to begin granting applications and issuing new station construction permits in January, she said.

Prospects for approval of the Innovation Act (HR-3309) appeared to have improved significantly ahead of a planned House Judiciary Committee markup Wednesday. Industry stakeholders told us they believe the committee was far more likely to clear the bill after committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., released a new version Monday in the form of a manager’s amendment. If Carl Horton, chairman of the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform’s Steering Committee, “were a betting man, absolutely I think it passes out of committee,” he said. “The only question I think is going to be how strongly."

Voluntary industry efforts aren’t enough to protect consumers against cramming and the FCC needs to step in and regulate, a coalition of consumers groups told the commission in comments posted Tuesday on the FCC’s website. CTIA disagreed sharply with that argument. The FCC’s exploration of cramming rules for wireless carriers marks another area where the commission under new Chairman Tom Wheeler will have to weigh regulation versus voluntary action by carriers, industry officials say.

ORLANDO -- Electric utilities need more spectrum as utility and telecom operations continue to converge, said Russell Frisby, a former Maryland Public Service chairman, during a NARUC panel Tuesday. “Utilities are becoming more dependent on telecom, but they do not have access to sufficient and suitable spectrum,” said the current telecom attorney at Stinson Morrison Hecker. The spectrum crunch is exacerbating this problem as communications becomes more necessary for cybersecurity needs, said Frisby. State commissioners from Florida, Oklahoma and Idaho talked about how electric and utility infrastructure need to be fortified before, during and after natural and man-made disasters.

January’s court reversal of FCC content encoding rules shows limits on the agency acting on ancillary jurisdiction and on the commission making into rules industry deals where all affected sectors didn’t participate, said multichannel video programming distributor lawyers. Those MVPD representatives said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s ruling against the agency and in favor of the company, now called Dish Network but that went by EchoStar at the time the encoding rules were adopted about 10 years ago, shows that the rules are now outdated. Also at an FCBA brown-bag lunch, a lawyer for makers of consumer electronics and other high-technology interests said the industry deal on which the now-reversed encoding order was based wasn’t objected to before the commission adopted it. Rules cable now said were imposed on it were agreed to by that industry a decade ago, said the attorney, Robert Schwartz of Constantine Cannon.

The FCC is committed to advancing 911 location accuracy rules beyond the last update approved in 2011, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Monday during a day-long 911 location accuracy workshop at FCC headquarters. “I have been pro-911 and pro-911 location since the beginning of the location challenge,” said Wheeler, who paid an unscheduled visit to the workshop. States led by California have raised concerns that current requirements aren’t good enough. Carriers have been locked in a fight with the Find Me 911 Coalition, which they say is funded by technology provider TruePosition and has been spreading bad information to the states. On Monday, the FCC waded into the fight.