The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted Thursday to raise the California Teleconnect Fund (CTF) surcharge from 0.93 percent to 1.08 percent on revenues collected from end-users for intrastate telecommunications services subject to surcharge effective June 1. The increased surcharge will help meet the CTF program’s increased funding needs, the CPUC said, saying the commission increased the program’s annual budget by $40 million for FY 2015 to $148 million. The increased surcharge will raise the CTF program’s revenue by $1.7 million per month, meaning the program’s revenue will increase by $1.7 million during the remainder of FY 2014 and $20.43 million in FY 2015, the CPUC said. The commission's FY 2015 will begin July 1.

Google filed a business registration with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office for its Google Fiber service, but no cities in the state are on track to receive the service, said a company spokeswoman. She didn't elaborate on the purpose of the registration. Google said earlier this week that it plans to deploy Google Fiber in Salt Lake City (see 1503250063) and in January announced planned service in the Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, metropolitan areas. Google has said it’s also studying potential deployments in Portland, Phoenix, San Antonio and San Jose, California. “We have a lot of work to do before we can talk about additional expansion plans,” the Google spokeswoman said.

Google said it plans to bring its Google Fiber service to Salt Lake City but didn’t provide a timeline for network deployment. Google Fiber already is available in nearby Provo, Utah, along with the Kansas City and Austin, Texas, metropolitan areas. Google said in late January that it also plans to bring Google Fiber to the Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham metropolitan areas (see 1501270053). The company also has been exploring deployments in several other metropolitan areas, including Portland, Ore., and San Antonio. A blog post by Devin Baer, Google Fiber associate city manager-Salt Lake City, said: “Over the coming months, we’ll work closely with these cities to map out just where to lay our fiber-optic cables.”

The Computer and Communications Industry Association slammed two bills under consideration in the Florida legislature, saying they're “similar” to the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act that Congress shelved in 2012. The identical bills in each house are referred to as the True Origin of Digital Goods Act and mandate that website owners and operators that post copyrighted works also publicly list their names, addresses and other contact information, the text of the Florida House version said. Rightsholders would be allowed to file for injunctive relief against those website owners who fail to make their information available, it said. That is a “violation” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions, which have been “essential to a thriving Internet industry,” said CCIA CEO Ed Black in a news release Tuesday. “Effective uniform national tools exist to address these issues; the Florida legislature need not and should not reinvent the wheel,” he said. “The public has resoundingly rejected legislative efforts to draft online services into policing Internet content through site-blocking,” Black said, referring to SOPA and PIPA.

The Supreme Court denied certiorari Monday to the Illinois Public Telecommunications Association (IPTA), the Independent Payphone Association of New York (IPANY) and the Payphone Association of Ohio (PAO). They collectively appealed the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s June 2014 ruling in IPTA v. FCC. The Supreme Court’s decision lets stand the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that the FCC 2013 decision not to overturn state utility regulators’ decisions nor grant payphone service providers refunds from AT&T and Verizon was reasonable and within FCC discretion. The groups had asked the D.C. Circuit to only mandate that the telcos pay the refunds or force the telcos to send funds received from long-distance carriers to the U.S. Treasury (see 1406160029). U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and commission attorneys urged the Supreme Court on Feb. 11 to deny certiorari on the case, because the D.C. Circuit “correctly upheld the FCC’s determination that state authorities were better positioned than the federal agency to decide the applicability of the filed-rate doctrine in individual refund disputes” (see 1502190013). The IPANY is “greatly disappointed” that the Supreme Court denied certiorari since the case was fundamentally about FCC refusal to enforce existing Bell system commitments and commission rules for dial-around compensation, said association attorney Keith Roland of the Herzog Law Firm. PAO “knew it was an uphill climb” to get a Supreme Court hearing for the case, but the group wanted to ensure it pursued the case to its conclusion from its beginnings 18 years ago, said attorney Donald Evans of Fletcher Heald, representing that organization. Attorneys for IPTA and the FCC didn’t comment.

Frontier Communications said it continues to update its emergency preparedness plans in western Washington as the region neared the one-year anniversary Sunday of the March 22, 2014, mudslide in Darrington, Lake Cavanaugh, Oso and the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe’s land. The mudslide killed 43 people and destroyed dozens of homes. Darrington and the Sauk-Suiattle tribe continued to have 911 and local phone service following the mudslide, but Lake Cavanaugh and Oso were completely cut off from telecom service, Frontier said Thursday. The company said it deployed 14,000 feet of temporary fiber to restore services in the affected areas, fully restoring full service in Darrington within two days of the mudslide. Frontier installed a permanent replacement fiber cable linking Darrington and nearby Arlington March 10. The company said it installed public high-speed broadband and Wi-Fi access at Darrington, Oso and Sauk-Suiattle public buildings and established fiber, HDTV and Wi-Fi access at Federal Emergency Management Agency locations in Darrington and Everett. “Frontier’s response to the Landslide was critical and immediate,” Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin said in a Frontier news release. “Not only did they work to restore communication services for emergency personnel and the people who needed to reach and reassure loved ones, but they dug in with the first responders and did whatever was needed to assist.” Frontier said it believes it’s important for the communities it serves to know that the company continues to update its emergency response plans based on lessons it learns from incidents like the March 22 mudslide and “is prepared for potential natural disasters and other emergencies that may be ahead.”

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and New York Public Service Commission (PSC) said separately Wednesday that they're delaying votes on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal. The CPUC said it’s delaying its vote on a proposed decision approving Comcast/TWC until May 7, while the New York PSC said it’s extending its deadline to issue a final order on the deal to April 20. The CPUC had planned to vote on Comcast/TWC March 26, while the New York PSC’s previous deadline for issuing a decision on the deal was Thursday. CPUC Administrative Law Judge Karl Bemesderfer said in an email to parties in that commission’s review of Comcast/TWC that he was delaying a vote on the proposed decision “in order to give myself time to respond fully to the many comments filed on the PD and to rule on the various motions filed by the parties in the last few weeks.” CPUC Commissioner Carla Peterman plans a second all-party meeting on the proposed decision on April 3 at the commission’s Los Angeles office to get input from TWC “and others in southern California potentially affected by the proposed merger,” Bemesderfer said. A previous CPUC all-party meeting on the proposed Comcast/TWC decision drew criticism from all parties, with Comcast and other companies associated with Comcast/TWC opposing most of the 25 conditions included in the proposed decision. Nearly all public interest groups at the meeting again said they believe the CPUC should reject the deal outright rather than approving with conditions (see 1502260060).

Frontier Communications of the Carolinas and Duke Energy Carolinas jointly asked the FCC to extend the discovery deadline in their proceeding for 90 days, until June 26, in a petition posted Wednesday in docket 14-215. It said the commission’s scheduling order in the proceeding, one of three involving a dispute over the use of each other’s utility poles, provided less than 30 days for discovery.

AT&T said it invested $1.6 billion on wireless and wireline network upgrades in Ohio between 2012 and 2014, and spent the same amount on network upgrades in New Jersey during that period. The Ohio upgrades included launching service for former Alltel customers in 22 counties and installing a distributed antenna system at Ohio State University’s Ohio Stadium, the company said Tuesday. The telco and wireless carrier also added LTE service in 24 Ohio municipalities in 2014. AT&T said in separate news releases that between 2012 and 2014, it spent $950 million on upgrades in Virginia, $875 million in South Florida, almost $550 million in Maryland and almost $300 million in West Virginia.

CEA looks forward “to continuing to work” with the California Energy Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy, “as they look for additional energy-saving opportunities in IT products and equipment," Doug Johnson, vice president-technology policy, said in an emailed statement Thursday on the CEC’s proposed new energy-efficiency standards for computers and monitors. Private-sector "innovation" and the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program “are the key drivers of energy efficiency for computers and monitors, as evidenced by their low levels of energy consumption today,” Johnson said, reflecting longstanding CEA policy favoring energy efficiency improvements in tech products through private-sector initiatives rather than regulation. Energy Star was hatched as a public-private program decades ago by certifying computers “and has achieved tremendous success in the decades since,” he said. Recent CEA studies have found the average desktop computer uses 43 cents’ worth of energy in a week, and that the average annual energy consumption for a monitor is 54 percent lower than it was in 2010, Johnson said. “Even though there are more consumer electronics in U.S. homes than ever, those devices now account for a lower percentage of electricity usage per household." The Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, in a joint statement Thursday, had a different take. CFA and CU cited a 2014 CFA analysis that found that between 2000 and 2013, “the amount of electricity gobbled up by computers, game consoles and network connectivity devices increased more than five-fold in the U.S., reaching an average of 800 kWh per year per household.” CFA and CU hail the proposed CEC standards as “strong and reasonable” and fair to manufacturers as they afford them “considerable flexibility” in compliance, “thereby stimulating competition to meet the standards” in the least costly ways, they said. The proposed CEC rules would take effect in 2018 for desktop computers and 2017 for small servers, work stations and notebook computers. “Few industries have worked to make more dramatic improvements in their return on energy investment than the technology sector, and estimates are that computers have attained over a 266 billion percent improvement since the 1960s," Chris Hankin, Information Technology Industry Council senior director-environment and sustainability, emailed us Friday. That finding was from a 2011 American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy report that measured energy use improvements for the five decades through 2010, Hankin said. The proposed CEC standards “would reduce the average energy use for a typical computer, monitor and display, without affecting the functionality or performance, using available, off-the-shelf technologies,” said a final-draft CEC staff report, posted Thursday on the commission’s website. The proposed standards statewide would save more than 585 gigawatt-hours per year statewide in energy use of computer monitors and displays and 2,117 GWh per year in computers, “after the inefficient existing stock is replaced,” the report said. It estimates the greenhouse gas reductions that would result would equal 634,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year for computers, and 183,000 metric tons of CO2 yearly for monitors and displays, the report said. In terms of monetary savings, the proposed rules would save Californians $434 million a year in electricity bills, $340 million of that through more energy-efficient computers, it said. The proposed rules set performance standards for computers “that are not prescriptive and allow the industry flexibility to choose how to comply,” the report said. “The energy savings are achievable through a combination of hardware and/or software improvements. Computer manufacturers can choose components that use less energy and are cost-effective to consumers. Software enhancements can be implemented at low costs and can reduce wasteful energy consumption by implementing hardware idle modes that already exist.” CEC plans a “staff workshop” on the proposed rules for April 15, 10 a.m., at commission headquarters in Sacramento, said a public notice posted Thursday on the CEC website. The workshop will be webcast, and will "provide industry, stakeholders, and the public an opportunity to seek clarifications on the staff report analyses and to make comments” on the proposed rules, the notice said. Written comments on the proposed rules are due May 15 at 4 p.m. PDT in docket 14-AAER-2, the notice said. Anyone wanting to make a scripted presentation at the workshop must submit the presentation by April 13 and may not exceed 10 minutes, it said.