The Wi-Fi Alliance is pushing back at assertions that terrestrial low-power service (TLPS) for broadband will alleviate traffic congestion for Wi-Fi users, calling such claims “inaccurate and misleading.” In a filing posted Wednesday in RM-11685, Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa said the claim that using the 2473-2495 MHz band in TLPS would widen the Wi-Fi highway doesn't fly because there are no FCC-approved devices that would work on the proposed TLPS network. “There is no evidence that TLPS will be anything but a private, stand-alone, low-power network,” Figueroa said. “Unless Wi-Fi users pay for the privilege of accessing TLPS, they will have no additional spectrum on which to operate their Wi-Fi devices.” In fact, Figueroa said, TLPS could cause interference to Wi-Fi devices: “The very limited technical evaluation that has occurred to date has been rushed and constrained, and the results are inconclusive.” Globalstar has been lobbying for rules that would let it use its TLPS for broadband, arguing that it would ease Wi-Fi congestion. The Wi-Fi Alliance is among an array of industry groups that have raised concerns about TLPS, including the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, CEA, the Entertainment Software Association, NCTA, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge and the Wireless ISP Association (see 1505220048). In a statement Friday, Globalstar said those concerns "are rooted solely by anti-competitive motivations." The company in March said it "agreed to demonstrate the ability for TLPS to peacefully coexist with incumbent unlicensed operations and the opposition groups were also given a platform to showcase their results, followed by characterization testing at an FCC laboratory. The opposition was given the chance to demonstrate any technical basis for their concerns in a real-world environment. The results from this demonstration were clear and fully supportive of Globalstar’s contentions. Even the opposition’s own results, with an extreme and unrealistic network that was constructed with the sole purpose of trying to somehow show interference, failed to support their purported concerns. As there is no sound engineering support for the other side’s expressed concerns, in a process that has been open for public comment for over two and a half years, it is clear that the opposition is working only to suppress new and innovative entrants like Globalstar and TLPS."
Broadband Internet issues -- not cable -- will be the focus of federal regulators reviewing the proposed Charter Communications buy of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable, said former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth and Public Knowledge President Gene Kimmelman on the latest segment of C-SPAN's The Communicators. "It's going to get very serious review," Kimmelman said. "What happens to my cable bill? What happens to my broadband prices? Do I get better speeds? Will the Netflix, the Amazon [streaming video] products ... be more available or will this combined entity try to cut off my options? That'll be the big [regulatory] question. The cable company has an incentive to favor its own product." Furchtgott-Roth said much of the FCC and Justice Department analyses likely will involve local individual markets. "These are geographically distinct companies," Furchtgott-Roth said. "I'm not convinced they have greater market power collectively than they do individually. At least initially from the outside, it's very difficult to see that there will be substantial antitrust problems." The episode was to have been televised Saturday on C-SPAN and is scheduled for 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Monday on C-SPAN-2.
The FCC is working on rules, educational campaigns and telecom billing issues, as well as on partnering with grassroots and advocacy groups for aging Americans, to try to help improve their digital literacy, agency officials said during a webinar Thursday. The webinar is the first in a series tied to Older Americans Month, which was created with partners to highlight resources for professionals who work with seniors to address their digital literacy and broadband adoption needs, officials said. "It's so very important that seniors understand and appreciate how technology can be used to help improve lives," said Kris Monteith, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau acting chief. For many older Americans, digital literacy isn't a part of their lives, for a number of reasons, said Gwenn Weaver, NTIA program officer. Individuals may not have access to the technology or can't afford to acquire it, she said. They may not feel that the current technologies are relevant to them and their lives, or it just may be too unfamiliar and too scary. Access to and the ability to use information and communications technologies is critical for older Americans, as well, Weaver said. Seventy-seven percent of older adults say they would need assistance before using a new high-tech device, said Dina Lehmann-Kim, Department of Housing and Urban Development program manager. For those older Americans who use HUD services, the cost of devices and accompanying services are also a barrier, she said. HUD can help open and operate neighborhood networks or computer centers and hire staff to support those initiatives, she said. In-unit routers may also be purchased with some HUD funds, Lehmann-Kim said. Service coordinators can link residents in HUD housing to services or bring services on-site, she said. Software and hardware purchases from community centers or computer labs are also an available service from HUD that can benefit the aging population, she said.
Crown Castle and Quanta Services asked the FCC for authorization for a deal in which Crown Castle will buy Quanta Fiber Networks, also called Sunesys. The $1 billion transaction was unveiled in April and will give Crown Castle 10,000 miles of fiber in major metropolitan markets across the U.S., including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, northern New Jersey, Philadelphia and Silicon Valley. “The Transaction will serve the public interest,” the companies told the FCC. They said "the financial, technical, and managerial resources” Crown Castle “will bring to Licensees are expected to enhance the ability of Licensees to compete in the telecommunications marketplace.” Customers will receive service “at the same rates, terms and conditions” after the deal is complete, the companies said. Crown Castle said in April that the deal bolsters its “leading position in small cell networks by more than doubling Crown Castle's fiber footprint available for small cell deployments and expanding Crown Castle's presence in many of the top U.S. metropolitan markets.”
Consumers have lots of defenses against unwanted robocalls, Verizon said in a blog post Wednesday, the day the FCC said new rules on automated calls are to get a vote at the commission’s June 18 meeting (see 1505270048). “We understand that unwanted robocalls can be a bother, and we stop many robocalls before they reach consumers,” the carrier said. “We monitor our networks to detect spikes in suspicious calls, and then work with law enforcement and with other communications companies to shut down illegal robocallers.” There are “dozens of free call-blocking apps from a wide variety of developers” available on the App Store and Google Play, and CTIA offers a list of apps for all operating systems, Verizon said. The FCC appears poised to stand up to industry in its proposed declaratory ruling on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) and the National Association of Consumer Advocates said Thursday in a news release. “We applaud the FCC chairman for upholding the essential consumer protections” in the TCPA, said NCLC attorney Margot Saunders. “The industry petitions would have gutted this key consumer law and exposed consumers to a tsunami of unwanted robocalls and texts to their cell phones.”
The FCC plans to vote June 18 on a draft order to authorize VoIP providers to obtain phone numbers directly from numbering administrators, rather than from intermediaries, said the agency's tentative agenda released Thursday. Under FCC rules and precedent, generally only telecom carriers can obtain phone numbers from numbering authorities for assignment to end users. That means interconnected VoIP providers such as Vonage must use carriers, such as CLECs and affiliates, to obtain numbers. The draft order would establish a streamlined process that would allow interconnected VoIP providers to request and obtain numbers directly from administrators, an FCC official said.
Government policymakers should be careful about relying too heavily on outside forecasts that show spiraling wireless data demand, said Armand Musey, president of the Summit Ridge Group, and Aalok Mehta, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, in a new paper. The stakes are higher in wireless when policymakers get things wrong, they argue. “Unlike most other resources, the electromagnetic spectrum, by its very nature, is a physically limited resource; no new frequencies can ever be created or destroyed,” they wrote. “In general, this means that once spectrum is allocated to one set of users, it is not available for alternative applications or technologies.” This differs from wireline, they said: In wireline industries, expansion of fiber backbones -- even when this requires access to public resources such as rights-of-way -- "does not generally crowd out the ability of competing companies or applications to deploy their own infrastructure.” Spectrum is also a public resource, they said. “Its exploitation carries a much stronger consideration of public welfare than many other resources.” Decisions about spectrum are long lasting, they said. “Moving incumbent users off spectrum bands in response to technological or economic changes, for example, is generally time-consuming, expensive, and contentious, often taking billions of dollars of upfront investment to facilitate relocation and more than a decade to complete.” The two said in a footnote that they weren't compensated by any party for writing the paper.
FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai continued his attacks on the agency's net neutrality order, and also took aim at the agency's recent broadband privacy guidance (see 1505200059). "There’s been a dramatic shift towards heavy-handed regulation of the Internet -- one that has created tremendous uncertainty and is already resulting in broadband providers cutting back on investments," he said in his written remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday at the International Institute of Communications Telecommunications and Media Forum in Miami. Pai said FCC policy for years removed barriers to investment, helping spur broadband deployment and innovation. "Unfortunately, the U.S. government is now putting our success at risk," he said. "First and foremost is the FCC’s recent net neutrality decision -- a decision to apply last century’s public-utility laws to today’s broadband providers, a decision to regulate everything from the last mile of the network to interconnection near the Internet’s core." Pai said the FCC order, which adopted net neutrality rules and reclassified broadband under Title II of the Communications Act, complicated the business case for deployment. He said the regulations "give the FCC power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how broadband providers offer service and manage their networks." That injected uncertainty into the market, Pai said. "Take the so-called 'Internet conduct standard' as an example. It gives the FCC power to review businesses models and prohibit pricing plans that benefit consumers," he said. "Everything from zero rating to usage-based pricing might be on the chopping block. And 'might' is the key. The vaguely worded standard gives the FCC a lot of discretion." Pai also questioned the utility of recent Enforcement Bureau guidance on broadband privacy, which he said was vague. "What exactly do broadband providers have to do to comply with the law? I'm an FCC Commissioner and a lawyer, and I have no idea. You're guess is as good as mine. This 'guidance' casts far more shade than sunlight."
Unlicensed spectrum is no solution for positive train control, said Richard Bennett, network engineer, on the HighTech Forum blog. PTC emerged as a big issue after the May 12 deadly Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia (see 1505150047). Some public interest groups argued at the time unlicensed spectrum is the answer, but it's not, at least not by itself, Bennett wrote. “One of the most important takeaways from the Amtrak derailment is the difficulty of developing new systems for old industries that use spectrum,” he said. “This is a very technical subject that is well outside the expertise of railway engineers; it’s similar in that respect to auto safety systems that are targeted to use 5.9 GHz spectrum allocated by Congress for their use. That spectrum directly conflicts with the planned expansion of Wi-Fi. These systems also stress the ability of radio engineers because they don’t know the application very well.” Bennett said LTE-unlicensed could have use in PTC. “It could very well be the case that the railroads would be best served by an LTE-U-like hybrid system that combines the licensed spectrum already in the hands of mobile operators with unlicensed spectrum capable of doing the up-close work of monitoring train speed, direction, and identity,” he said.
TechFreedom and the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) filed joint comments Tuesday on the FTC’s upcoming workshop on the Sharing Economy, in which the groups urged the FTC to establish a permanent advocacy program to serve as a counterweight to “entrenched incumbents who typically seek local and state government policies that prevent their markets from being disrupted by ‘sharing economy’ services.” The FTC spends a tiny fraction of its budget on competition advocacy, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said. "For years, Uber, Lyft, and other sharing-economy companies have been grappling with regulators doing the bidding of established industries,” Szoka said, while the FTC has “been asleep at the wheel -- too busy harassing tech companies over their use of customer data." The FTC needs to make advocacy an institutional priority and become more proactive, Szoka said. “The FTC should resist the tendency to regulate Uber, AirBnB and other sharing economy companies the same way it's regulated privacy and data security -- by bringing major players under consent decrees that force the companies to start vetting product innovations with the FTC,” ICLE Associate Director Ben Sperry said. “Forcing innovators to 'play it safe' will sap the disruptive spirit that has made these companies so successful,” he said. Free State Foundation President Randolph May, Senior Fellow Seth Cooper and Research Associate Michael Horney submitted comments to the FTC Tuesday, in which they encouraged the agency to focus on enhancing overall consumer welfare and consumer satisfaction. The success of the sharing economy is due to creative risk-taking, the comments said. “Sharing economy services and related applications must remain free to form and operate without the strictures of any new sector-specific regulations or older regulations designed for incumbent providers of legacy services,” they said. “The proper way to respond to ‘level the playing field’ between sharing economy entrants and incumbent service providers is to remove unnecessary regulations wherever they apply, not expand them in a competitive market environment.” Health, safety and consumer protection laws and regulations can be enforced so long as they are not formulated and implemented in a discriminatory fashion, they said. “Opponents of new sharing economy business models and disruptive new Internet applications should not be allowed to succeed in misusing laws and regulations in order to stifle the services merely because they perceive adverse impact on preexisting businesses.”