The FCC’s International, Wireless and Wireline bureaus jointly Friday approved Frontier Communications’ bid to buy AT&T’s wireline, broadband and video assets in Connecticut (http://bit.ly/1t5sYPb). Frontier said it has also received approval from the Department of Justice and is awaiting approval from the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Pending that approval, Frontier said,it will close the deal in Q4. Frontier will pay $2 billion for AT&T’s wireline business, its statewide fiber network, its U-verse video business in the state and some satellite-TV customers. The deal was originally announced in December (CD Dec 18 p9). Frontier has said it plans to expand 10 Mbps broadband service to an additional 100,000 homes AT&T’s network currently doesn’t serve at that speed and has “committed to improving wireline service in the state,” the FCC said. Frontier has addressed concerns from the Communications Workers of America, committing to guaranteeing all existing jobs connected with the AT&T services included in the deal and pledging it will add 85 CWA-represented jobs in the state, the FCC said.

Executives from Alaskan telco Adak Eagle Enterprises and its Windy City Cellular subsidiary urged FCC staff last week to provide a “permanent solution” to the funding issues they have sought to alleviate by seeking a waiver of a monthly $250 per line cap on high-cost universal service support, the companies said in an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 10-90(http://bit.ly/1pmMl2l). Adak Eagle and Windy City have been seeking FCC reconsideration of their waiver petition, which the Wireless and Wireline bureaus denied last year (CD Aug 16 p5). Neither company can survive “absent a waiver,” they said, saying Windy City was the only cellular service available in June to Adak Island residents who had evacuated to the island’s Bering Hill while awaiting a possible tsunami. The companies also reminded the FCC that the interim funding the FCC granted them in late February -- $33,276 to Adak Eagle and $40,104 to Windy City -- would run out Thursday.

USTelecom Senior Vice President-Law and Policy Jonathan Banks expressed concern about the speed metric used in the FCC’s 2014 Measuring Broadband America Report on Fixed Broadband during a July 16 meeting that broadband providers, public interest groups and others had with commission staff, according to an ex parte report (http://bit.ly/1o0m8lW) posted Friday. Banks questioned using the metric of whether users experienced the advertised speed 80 percent of the time, the report said. The FCC felt comfortable with the measure but it could be discussed further at the next meeting of the group, said Walter Johnson, chief of the FCC’s Electromagnetic Compatibility Division, according to the filing. The FCC is putting in place a policy to release raw broadband speed data to the public every six months, to ensure that the release of data was not linked to the schedule for the report, Johnson said, according to the filing. The commission is also broadening its scope to include performance of video services, the filing quoted Johnson as saying.

Comments are being sought on five petitions seeking a declaratory ruling and/or a waiver concerning section 64.1200(a)(4)(iv) of FCC rules, said a public notice from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Friday (http://fcc.us/1pha4Rr). The rule requires fax ads sent to a consumer who has provided prior express invitation or permission to include an opt-out notice. The petitioners are seeking a declaratory ruling clarifying that the section does not apply to faxes sent with the “prior express invitation or permission” of the recipient because they contend the commission lacks authority to regulate “solicited” faxes. Comments are due Aug. 8, replies Aug. 15 in docket 02-178.

The number of homes connected with fiber in North America grew from 9.7 million in May 2013 to 10.4 million this year, said a survey by RVA for the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Council released Wednesday. Users reported spending five hours a day at home online, using 5.5 Internet-ready devices in the home, a council news release said. Broadband users under 35 report getting just more than half of their video content from online sources, said the release. The importance of broadband to consumers “increases with each passing year,” said RVA President Michael Render in the release. End-to-end fiber networks “are becoming more and more differentiated from other types of broadband in terms of performance, use, and perception,” he said. Speed testing during the survey found that FTTH residences have five times faster download speeds and 23 times faster upload speeds, the release said. FTTH users spend 49 fewer hours annually waiting for applications to load than do users with the slowest type of broadband.

The FCC should ban pay-to-play arrangements through a combination of Section 706 and, if necessary, Title II, AOL Chief Counsel for Global Public Policy Leigh Freund, Pantelis Michalopoulos of Steptoe & Johnson, and Andrew Guhr, counsel to AOL, told officials from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s office, the Wireline Bureau, and the legislative affairs and media relations offices July 17, an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1nRY84x) posted Tuesday said. The agency should “adopt firmer and simpler rules,” including bans on pay-to-play when a broadband access provider is affiliated with an upstream edge provider, when the provider has market power, or is in the business of charging end-users, the filing said. All other pay-to-play arrangements would be subject to prior approval by the commission, AOL said. The rules would be sufficiently different from common carrier rules to pass muster, AOL said. Title II should be a last resort if Section 706 rules prove insufficient, the filing said.

Title II common carriage is a highly deregulatory and flexible framework, designed to preserve core nondiscrimination principles even in competitive telecom markets, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood told aides to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Wednesday, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1mwluwk) posted in docket 14-28 Monday. Prior commissions “were wrong” in categorizing broadband as an information service, and the circumstances that led to the designation have since changed, Wood said at the meetings. Common Carrier status also had no negative impact on broadband deployment, “and Section 706 cannot serve as a basis for enforceable protections against broadband providers’ blocking, discrimination, or unreasonable terminating access fees,” Wood told the aides, according to the filing. Title II should be a last resort if Section 706 rules prove not viable or inadequate, said Tekedra Mawakana, Yahoo global head of public policy, and Margaret Nagle, Yahoo head of U.S. government affairs, in a meeting July 16 with an aide to Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, and at a separate meeting the same day with aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler. Preserving a free and open Internet is particularly important as more users access online content on smartphones or tablets, Yahoo said at the meetings. Attorneys Andrew Guhr and Pantelis Michalopoulos, both of Steptoe & Johnson, also participated in the meeting with Wheeler’s aides. Guhr participated in the meeting with Rosenworcel’s aide.

Permanent rate caps on inmate calls should be the same for all inmate calling services (ICS) providers, Securus said in filing (http://bit.ly/1nNFavQ) a required cost study with the FCC posted in docket 12-375 on Friday. Rate caps should also be set at higher than the average costs or facilities with higher than average costs will not be served, Securus said. Commissions charged by local governments to ICS providers, which are passed on to callers, can raise rates by 40 percent, and any attempt to rein in rates should address the commissions, the filing said. That said, addressing commissions represents a public policy question of whether jail costs should be paid by the public or subsidized by the friends and family who pay for inmate calls, Securus said. Any elimination of commissions should include a transition period to allow facilities to find other revenue streams, the company said.

Verizon has admitted it’s deliberately constraining capacity from network providers like Level 3 that chose “to deliver video content requested by Verizon’s own paying broadband consumers,” a Level 3 executive said last week in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1zRazaA). The post by Mark Taylor, vice president-content and media, responded to a Verizon blog post (http://vz.to/1mDnTcythat) that attributed congestion to Netflix’s interconnection with the telco’s border router (CD July 11 p18). Verizon’s post included a diagram of a network that has lots of unused capacity at the busiest time of day, Taylor said. The telco “freely admitted that it has the ability to deliver lots of Netflix streams to broadband customers requesting them, at no extra cost,” he said. But it has shown that it prefers not to deliver these streams, “even though its subscribers have paid it to do so,” he said. The utilization of all of those thousands of links across the Level 3 network is much the same as Verizon’s depiction of its own network, he said. “We have to maintain adequate headroom because that’s what we sell to customers.” The congestion occurs where Level 3 and Verizon networks interconnect, he said. Verizon confirmed that everything between the router in its network and its subscribers is uncongested, so it “in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used,” he said. The congestion can be fixed in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10 Gbps ports on those routers, he said. Verizon has refused to do so, he said. “So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion."

The future of phone numbers isn’t getting enough attention during the IP transition, panelists said at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discussion Wednesday. An early sign of the issues that could arise is that VoIP has proved to be an attractive way to make robocalls, using spoof numbers that show up on caller ID, said FCC Chief Technology Officer Henning Schulzrinne. “We'll be swamped by spoofing” if the issue of validating phone calls isn’t dealt with, he said. Whether machines that, like traffic signals now, use phone numbers to operate should be assigned numbers after the transition is another issue, he said. If not, local governments with traffic light systems that use numbers will have to adapt, said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld. Issues will be resolved, but transitions often carry problems, said Tom McGarry, a vice president in Neustar’s Advanced Technology Group. Making wireless numbers portable was initially “somewhat of a disaster,” he said. “People’s numbers were being lost, service was being turned off.” Most people assume the nation’s phone number system will always work and pay little heed, but not paying attention to the technical issues involved during the transition could lead to problems gradually popping up “like potholes in the road,” Schulzrinne said.