CTIA and groups representing small carriers sought reconsideration of the FCC’s October 5G Fund order, approved over partial dissents by Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks (see 2010270034). Recon petitions were posted Tuesday in docket 20-32. CTIA asked the FCC to revise the noncompliance penalty to limit potential recovery of prior funding to the support an eligible telecom carrier failed to spend in compliance with fund requirements. “The Order imposes an unreasonable and unprecedented penalty … on mobile wireless ETCs that do not meet the newly-adopted deployment requirements, or that voluntarily relinquish future support -- even if the ETC’s actual spending complied” with the order's minimum 5G spending requirements, CTIA said: The penalties are “unreasonable and inconsistent with permissible spending rules." The Rural Wireless Association and NTCA jointly asked the FCC to rethink whether funds should be available for areas served by unsubsidized 4G networks. “That an unsubsidized 4G LTE network may be deployed in a particular area provides no guarantee or even reasonable assurance that 5G service meeting the required performance metrics will be deployed there, nor is there any basis for concluding that the deployment of 5G service to such an area is likely to occur,” the groups said: “History consistently instructs that rural areas are almost never served with the latest generation of service unless and until a small rural carrier based in that area begins to provide such service.” Smith Bagley asked the FCC to rethink a decision not to mandate special-case treatment for remote tribal lands. “The Commission denied special case treatment … without considering the substantial evidence placed into the record over many years demonstrating dire demographic and economic conditions” there, the carrier said: “The Commission has no factual basis for its view that conditions in Alaska are so unique that special treatment such as an ‘Alaska Plan’ is not warranted elsewhere.”
The FCC said it's selecting awardees for its $100 million Connected Care pilot program (see 2004290054). Commissioner Brendan Carr praised the initiative Monday, calling it the "healthcare equivalent of shifting from Blockbuster to Netflix."
CEO Ganesh Pattabiraman and others from NextNav spoke with FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington and an aide to Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on the company’s “continued progress” in building a vertical location network. “NextNav’s infrastructure has already been constructed and is active in 90 of the 105 cellular market areas that NextNav identified for its initial buildout effort,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 07-114.
GCI Liberty and Liberty Broadband consummated their transaction that has GCI becoming part of a Liberty subsidiary (see 2008310050), GCI said in an FCC International Bureau notice of consummation filed Tuesday.
IBM settled with the FCC and agreed to return $24.25 million to the USF for violations regarding the E-rate program in New York City and El Paso school districts, a consent decree said Wednesday.
The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau sent letters to seven wireless carriers Monday asking about their request to waive the June 30 deadline to offer real-time text (RTT) instead of traditional text technology (TTY). Commissioners approved an order on a common standard for the transition in December 2016 (see 1612150048). The Competitive Carriers Association in June sought additional time on behalf of six of the companies (see 2006170039). The letters to Appalachian Wireless, Viaero Wireless, Inland Cellular, Southern Linc, GCI, Nex-Tech Wireless and Cellcom were posted Tuesday in docket 16-145. “Have any customers contacted the Company, complained to the Company, or both, regarding their ability to use a TTY with the Company’s service since it began offering IP-based voice calling services, and if so, when did each of these customers contact the Company and how did it respond?” the letters ask: “Have any customers contacted the Company, complained to the Company, or both, regarding the availability of RTT since it began offering IP-based voice calling services, and, if so, when did each of these customers contact the Company and how did it respond?”
The FCC Wireline Bureau released best practices Tuesday as carriers implement caller authentication frameworks designed to curb unwanted robocalls. “Best practices must be tailored to specific calling scenarios and functional relationships among service providers and their discrete Customer classes,” the report said: “As the industry’s technical working groups advance new robocall mitigation techniques, and if bad actors find ways to subvert current mitigation techniques, best practices must continue to evolve.” Best practice topics include “vetting caller identity” and attestation levels for secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) and signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken). The bureau “sought to avoid best practice recommendations that were overly prescriptive because narrowly tailored recommendations could be inapt for certain types of services,” the report said.
Google urged the FCC to move forward on an incumbent-informing spectrum sharing system operated by DOD for the citizens broadband radio service and adjacent 3.45-3.55 GHz band. “Such a system would notify authorized non-government users when they need to temporarily cease commercial operations in all or portions of the 3.45-3.55 GHz band to protect government operations” and would “avoid spectrum waste” inherent in the environmental sensing capability framework used in CBRS, said a filing posted Friday in docket 19-348.
The Department of Transportation has identified most of the oversight skills the agency’s workforce needs to regulate self-driving cars and other automated technologies, but hasn’t “fully assessed whether its workforce has these skills,” reported GAO Friday. “DOT did not survey staff or assess skill gaps in data analysis or cybersecurity positions important to automated technology oversight.” The agency therefore lacks “critical information needed to identify skill gaps and ensure key relevant staff are equipped to oversee the safety of these technologies now and in the future,” said the auditor. DOT agrees with GAO recommendations that it should “regularly measure progress toward closing skill gaps,” but thinks its current program of doing skills assessments every three years is “sufficient,” said the agency. GAO recommended annual assessments. DOT promised a “detailed response” to GAO's recommendations within 180 days.
The FCC should narrowly tailor new rules on sponsorship identification requirements for foreign-government-supplied content (see 2009150059), said NAB in a call with Media Bureau staff Tuesday, according to a filing posted Thursday in docket 20-299. The agency “may inadvertently sweep in other content, unduly burdening speech and creating unjustified compliance burdens,” NAB said. The group asked why the proposed rules apply only to broadcasters and not those who have either not demonstrated an ability in the past to be free from foreign influence (e.g., certain online platforms) or are similarly situated to broadcasters (e.g., MVPDs).”