Approval of Charter Communications' buys of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable will be delayed, possibly until June, largely because of California’s investigation into implications of the acquisition, said a California Public Utilities Commissioner Michael Picker's scoping ruling. The ruling sets a timetable for the decision, with the proposed decision scheduled for May 13 and the final decision June 10, which can be amended by an administrative law judge. Assuming no additional delays in the FCC proceeding, the FCC decision will be rendered on or before the middle of March, the ruling said. The Office of Ratepayer Advocates responded, on behalf of the protesters, that it's unlikely the FCC will meet its current mid-March deadline "for various procedural reasons and because the FCC has issued a lengthy and detailed information request that is unlikely to be complied with by Joint Applicants and reviewed by FCC staff in time for a mid-March decision," the ruling said. Protesters also said there may be contested issues of material fact in this proceeding that require evidentiary hearings, and whether such disputed issues exist won't be known until after the protesters have concluded at least a preliminary phase of discovery. Tuesday, RBC Capital analyst Jonathan Atkin said the delay of about two months is just a “procedural precaution” to give all opponents the chance to voice their concerns. Atkin said he's still 85 percent sure the deal will be approved because it “does not represent significant broadband market concentration and the FCC/[Department of Justice] can put in prophylactic safeguards to ensure a fair balance between programming and carrier interests.” Administrative Law Judge Karl Bemesderfer is the presiding officer in the case and will hold hearings on the proposed merger in May, the ruling said. Charter didn't comment Friday.

The Vermont Public Service Board agreed to open a proceeding on an ongoing contract negotiation dispute between Springfield Area Public Access Television (SAPA) and Vermont Telephone Co. (VTel), in a PSB order in docket 8609. SAPA has been trying to sign a contract with VTel since January 2012 to be the access management organization for VTel's cable TV system in several towns in the state. SAPA has asked the PSB for assistance multiple times since then, but VTel asked the board to delay beginning any proceeding pending SAPA's review of a new offer from VTel. SAPA and VTel had no comment Wednesday.

The California broadband workshop NTIA hosted last week (see 1511170062) underscored that while the state has made progress, there's still work to be done to close the digital divide, said a blog post from NTIA. Even with companies headquartered in the state -- Apple, Google and Intel, for example -- there remain remote areas with tribal lands that lack basic communications infrastructure and desert towns where students don't have Internet access to complete their homework, it said Thursday. Comprehensive mapping data from the California Public Utilities Commission shows 98 percent of urban households in the state have access to wired broadband speeds of at least 6 Mbps downstream, but that number drops to just 43 percent for rural households, NTIA said. The commission said the limited reliability of wireless service in many rural areas means wireless connections rarely fill the gap.

The Alaska Plan as a whole, including the rate-of-return and competitive eligible telecommunications carriers portions, needs to move forward, General Communication Inc. (GCI) said in an ex parte notice posted Tuesday by the FCC Wireline Bureau in docket 10-90. The plan will provide a stable environment to continue to improve broadband deployment in the state, GCI said. But GCI said Alaska Communications' proposal is "unrealistic, lacked notice as it applied across all forms of universal service support beyond the high cost support being considered in these dockets and suffered from potential substantive legal defects," the filing said. Alaska Communications on Thursday filed an ex parte report with an attached proposal for closing the middle mile gap in Alaska. The proposal said only by addressing the middle mile gap can the FCC fulfill its statutory duty to ensure that all Americans have access to "reasonably comparable, affordable, advanced broadband capability."

FirstNet is working to create and put into place a bring-your-own-device policy, it said in a blog post Monday. That BYOD policy needs to ensure that the device can be adequately controlled and be secure while still providing an acceptable user experience on the network, FirstNet said. It must also operate in real time to analyze BYOD access and identify anomalies. Because of many questions arising through the request for proposal process, FirstNet said it wrote the post to explain its plans to support personal devices through a BYOD policy that's being developed as part of the overall network architecture. An effective BYOD policy requires ongoing and active device technical support and expertise to manage a growing range of devices, operating systems and user devices, it said.

Maine's need for state FirstNet coverage is far bigger than original estimates, FirstNetME reported through its data collection Monday. The updated map shows far more red regions, indicating more high-priority areas of the state than originally thought. But FirstNetME also went a step further and identified high-, medium- and low-priority coverage needs across specific areas. For example, airports and military fall under the high-priority category, federal lands and railroads the medium-priority category, and parks and beaches the low-priority category.

Fifteen Minnesota communities will share $11 million in grants as a part of the state's Department of Employment and Economic Development's Border-to-Border Broadband Development Grant Program, said a Friday news release. The department received 44 applications for funding, totaling more than $29 million in requests, and recipients were selected based on an internal review and scoring process, it said. The grants are expected to improve access to high-speed broadband for 3,222 households, 786 businesses and nearly 90 community institutions, it said. The program’s first round of funding awarded $19.4 million to 17 communities in February, said the department.

There's no digital mapping information about the Oklahoma historical map, which the FCC recently adopted as a way to distinguish between tribal and nontribal lands in the state, said the Oklahoma Corporation Commission in an ex parte filing with the federal agency posted Wednesday in docket 09-197. The Feb. 9 deadline doesn't provide enough time to alert affected customers of a coming change in Lifeline support, said OCC. To remedy the situation, it recommends the FCC extend the effective date to 90 days from the date digital mapping information is made available to those affected parties. The boundary changes will result in a 73 percent reduction in Lifeline support -- from $34.25 per month to $9.25 per month -- for a "considerable number" of program customers, the OCC said.

Since 2013, 20 million more students have been connected to broadband at the FCC's minimum access goal of 100 kbps per student, said EducationSuperHighway in its inaugural State of the States report. That year, only 30 percent of schools met the FCC's goal, but now 77 percent of school districts do, the study said. In 2013, 300,000 teachers had the tools they needed, now 1.7 million teachers have the broadband they need to keep up in the 21st century, the paper said. The report tracks the progress of K-12 connectivity goals as established by the FCC. The information is based on application data from the FCC's Schools and Libraries Program and includes information from 6,781 public school districts, with more than 25 million students in about 49,000 schools in the 50 states, the report said. An analysis of the data found that school districts without fiber are 15 percent less likely to meet the FCC's connectivity goals and for the schools that meet the goal, the report said. EducationSuperHighway estimates it will cost about $1 billion to connect the remaining schools that don't have fiber, which it says is well within the E-rate program's budget.

Since the due date Sept. 30, FirstNet has received information from 54 states and territories -- including more than 11,600 public safety entities -- plus seven federal agencies through its formal data collection process, a blog post from the group said Thursday. The collection process, in coordination with NTIA’s State and Local Implementation Grant program, began in March and aimed to better understand how the public safety community uses mobile data communications, it said. The process was developed around coverage; users and operational areas; capacity planning; and current services and procurement vehicles.