The FCC should consider removing requirements for cable operators to make headend information available locally when it considers whether to eliminate the correspondence file requirement for commercial broadcasters, NCTA said in a letter posted in docket 14-127 Tuesday. The FCC said it would consider taking the broadcaster correspondence file online when it extended the online public file requirement to radio and pay-TV carriers. “The need to retain headend location information locally impedes cable operators from fully transitioning to an online file and should be examined in the same proceeding,” NCTA said. “Both involve the question of whether the costs of the remaining local file requirements outweigh any public benefits.” The FCC had said putting headend information online would be a security risk, but NCTA said keeping the information on hand locally “imposes unnecessary costs that should be examined in any upcoming rulemaking."

The FCC reminded political campaigns and calling services of limits on the use of autodialed calls (robocalls) or texts and prerecorded voice calls. "The FCC is committed to protecting consumers from harassing, intrusive, and unwanted robocalls and texts, including to cell phones and other mobile devices," the commission said in a public notice in Tuesday's Daily Digest. The enforcement advisory noted political campaigns are subject to FCC regulations under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which put restrictions on unsolicited prerecorded telemarketing calls to residential wireline phones and all autodialed calls or prerecorded voice calls to wireless numbers, emergency numbers and patient rooms in healthcare facilities. The "Enforcement Bureau will rigorously enforce the important consumer protections in the TCPA and our corresponding rules," the agency said. The PN contained summary descriptions of the restrictions and answers to FAQ.

The FCC should "confirm the continued availability of unbundled DS1 and DS3 copper loops," Windstream said Tuesday (unbundled ILEC loops must be made available to competitors at wholesale discounts). In meetings and calls with FCC officials, "Windstream urged the Commission to grant Windstream’s declaratory ruling petition in order to help ensure that the current competition options available to small business, government, and nonprofit customers of dedicated services will be unaffected by a change in transmission protocol from TDM to IP or by the use of fiber," the company said in a filing in docket 13-5. "As Windstream had highlighted when it filed its petition, the availability of unbundled DS1 and DS3 capacity loops was a foundational premise and justification for the Commission’s prior grants of forbearance with respect to specified packet-based services. The time is ripe for the Commission to act on disputes regarding these loops." Windstream noted various state regulatory commissions had supported its petition, including the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission (see 1603140070). Meanwhile, Anna-Maria Kovacs, a visiting senior policy scholar at Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, said in a study that CLECs and cable companies competing in the special access market are "in good financial health," while "ILECs' low cash flows reflect the continuously increasing cost of sustaining a ubiquitous network" serving just "a third of the lines for which it was engineered."

CenturyLink and Frontier said NCTA "misses the point" in objecting to their request that the FCC give price-cap ILECs $175 million a year in interim USF support for continuing to provide voice service in extremely remote areas so far unfunded by a new broadband-oriented subsidy mechanism. "The FCC determined last year that customers in these remote areas should continue to be offered voice service until that broadband solution is in place," the two incumbent telcos said in a joint email statement responding to NCTA opposition in docket 10-90 (see 1603140053). "Unfortunately, however, the FCC failed to continue the necessary USF support for that obligation. CenturyLink has joined AT&T and USTelecom in appealing this unfunded mandate." The ILECs said their proposed interim funding "would only be available in areas where there are no other competitive providers, such as cable companies, offering service and where the FCC has recognized that it is too costly to serve without support." They said they share NCTA's concern about devising a long-term solution and agreed the FCC should move swiftly to set up a Remote Areas Fund. "It is disappointing that NCTA is against our proposal as it surely would oppose any action to impose a comparable unfunded voice obligation on cable companies," they said. "More importantly, by adopting interim funding, the FCC will ensure that customers continue receiving critical voice services in these extremely rural, high-cost areas while the FCC moves as rapidly as possible to adopt the Remote Areas Fund."

The American Cable Association said 2011 FCC broadband transparency guidance worked well and should be applied to the 2015 net neutrality order's enhanced transparency requirements. The 2011 guidance clarified the approaches broadband ISPs could use to comply with the transparency rule's network performance disclosure requirements in a 2010 net neutrality order, ACA said in a Tuesday filing in docket 14-28 about its meeting with FCC staffers. The group said smaller providers particularly appreciated a clarification that a "broadband provider may disclose actual performance based on internal testing, consumer speed test data, or other data regarding network performance, including reliable, relevant data from third-party sources such as the broadband performance measurement project” (citing from the guidance). That allowed smaller ISPs to comply with the requirement to disclose network performance with greater certainty and without straining limited resources, it said. On the general network management practices of smaller cable ISPs, ACA said: "Since they understand that traffic is almost certain to continue to increase, ISPs will often engineer their networks to handle a traffic load that is significantly above 100% of advertised performance," noting providers will upgrade capacity if they see congestion emerging. The FCC should affirm the 2011 guidance applies to the 2015 enhanced transparency requirements, said the ACA, continuing to urge the agency to make permanent a temporary small provider exemption to those new rules. Among those meeting with Consumer and Governmental Affairs and Wireline bureau and Office of Strategic Policy staff were ACA Chairman Robert Gessner, Shentel Senior Vice President-Operations Tom Whitaker and Shurz Communications CEO Bryan Lynch.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake will open Monday's bureau workshop on the state of the video market (see 1603010051), starting at 10 a.m. in the Commission Meeting Room. Other speakers include Leichtman Research Group President Bruce Leichtman, University of Maryland economics professor Dan Vincent, BIA/Kelsey Senior Vice President Mark Fratrik, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield, Columbia University finance and economics professor Eli Noam, Wells Fargo Securities analyst Marci Ryvicker, Analysis Group Managing Principal Tasneem Chipty, Sanford Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger, Stanford University Graduate School of Business associate professor Ali Yurukoglu, Indiana University business economics and public policy associate professor Jeffrey Prince, and University of Texas-Dallas managerial economics associate professor Alejandro Zentner. Topics include the state of the video market and challenges faced by online video distributors and by multichannel video programming distributors, said a bureau public notice in Monday's Daily Digest.

AT&T said FCC Lifeline USF modernization efforts seem "to be moving in the right direction" but will depend on the details. AT&T welcomed an FCC draft order's plan for a national entity to verify consumer eligibility for the low-income support program, which would be extended to cover broadband service (see 1603080054). The proposal to take eligibility out of the hands of Lifeline providers "has the potential to be a transformative change if properly implemented," said AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi in a Monday blog post. "It could close the door on provider-initiated eligibility fraud and help re-focus the program on the consumers it was intended to serve." Cicconi said it's not clear how long it would take before Lifeline providers can stop performing the functions and whether the national eligibility verifier would take over other administrative functions providers currently perform. "Our fingers will remain crossed until we see all the details, and we may not uncross until we get further down the road to implementation. But Chairman [Tom] Wheeler and Commissioner [Mignon] Clyburn should be commended for championing this approach," he said. Cicconi said AT&T also appreciated the FCC's acknowledgement that existing Lifeline rules impose costs and burdens that discourage provider participation. He was disappointed, however, the FCC didn't propose to eliminate "eligible telecom carrier" requirements for Lifeline providers. He added, "It is also hard to imagine how the Commission can justify phasing out Lifeline support for standalone wireless voice but continue to support standalone wireline voice. Lifeline consumers overwhelmingly choose wireless voice over wireline. If any voice support is to be phased out it should be a technology neutral phase-out of support for all standalone voice. "In a filing Monday in docket 11-42 summarizing a meeting with aides to Wheeler, NCTA lauded the FCC proposal to create a streamlined national ETC process for designating Lifeline broadband providers.

The repacking process after the TV incentive auction will be complicated, require “significant resources” and should be the subject of a detailed plan by the FCC, AT&T warned in a letter to the FCC Monday. Joan Marsh, vice president-federal regulatory, said in the letter AT&T isn't commenting on how long the process should or might take. “Execution of large scale projects with complicated requirements like those contemplated by a robust broadcaster repacking plan contain inherent challenges and risks,” Marsh wrote. “We’ve seen this play out time and again, including with the DTV transition -- which took well over a decade to complete and merited three Congressional extensions of time -- and with the 800 MHz rebanding effort,” which started June 27, 2005, with a proposed 36-month time frame, but still isn't complete, she said. “Risks and challenges will abound, including: limits on the availability of necessary equipment; scarcity of skilled personnel necessary for planning, engineering analysis and construction; localized delays driven by weather, local regulations or other external events; and challenges repacking border markets that will rely on predicate action by Canadian and Mexican broadcasters,” Marsh wrote. There's not a “one-size solution” that “will fit all stations or all markets,” she said. Delays or the failure to properly plan or execute a plan could cause “significant” problems, particularly for the wireless industry, which “having spent billions for the spectrum,” will be eager to deploy licenses “as quickly as possible,” she said. “Failure to obtain timely access to the spectrum will have significant impact on the wireless industry, the products and services we provide, our customers and on the broader U.S. economy at large.” Broadcasters and some wireless carriers, particularly T-Mobile, have been at odds over whether the FCC should rethink the current 39-month repacking deadline for broadcasters (see 1602250038). NAB asked the FCC to impose a deadline only after it becomes clear how many licenses will change hands as a result of the auction.

A federal court reviewing an FCC order pre-empting North Carolina and Tennessee laws restricting municipal broadband efforts signaled interest in related legislation pending in both states. With oral argument scheduled for Thursday in Cincinnati, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote litigants in the North Carolina and Tennessee challenges to the FCC pre-emption order (Tennessee v. FCC, No. 15-3291, North Carolina v. FCC, No. 15-3555). “The panel directs counsel for the parties in this case that, in addition to addressing the arguments in the briefs, they should be prepared to answer questions about the significance, if any, of the pending legislation in both states that would amend the statutes to remove the barriers preempted by the FCC (Tenn. -- HB2133/SB2200 and NC HB349),” the clerk of the court wrote in a brief letter Friday. The only reason for the court to ask about the pending bills is if it suspects they might be enacted in the near future and moot aspects of the case, said Brad Ramsay, general counsel for NARUC, which intervened in support of the two states. But the odds of both bills being enacted are “very slim,” he told us Monday. “The legislation hasn’t passed, so you have a live case and controversy.” The court’s query is a bit “odd,” said Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Georgetown Institute for Public Representation, who filed an amicus brief supporting the FCC order on behalf of the Benton Foundation and other public-interest groups. “It is not unusual for some courts to notify the parties to be prepared to address particular questions, and that’s really helpful,” he told us. “But the questions here would be best done by letter because they’re completely speculative.” Nobody knows whether the bills will pass and in what form, he said. The FCC and North Carolina and Tennessee litigants had no comment.

FCC proposals to streamline rules for foreign ownership of stations will “facilitate investment in the broadcast sector” and improve transparency for broadcasters and investors, said a joint filing by CBS, Disney, 21st Century Fox and Univision posted in docket 15-236 Thursday. The proposals (see 1601220045) are universally supported, the programmers said. The “modest changes” will give broadcasters “greater predictability and reduced regulatory burdens and costs without in any way diminishing the government’s substantive oversight of foreign investment in the broadcast sector,” the programmers said.